Import remote file retrieval

Posted by cici in Our Add Ons, Professional

Power Add-on for WPSLP or the Professional level or higher for MySLP   allows the administrator to schedule your Import process from a remote file retrieval (must be accessible public) to provide more control over recurring imports from a full url where you CSV file resides and allows flexibility for scheduling the time for daily imports.

WordPress CRON is not exact, it executes the next time a visitor comes to your site.

WordPress times are UTC/GMT time NOT local time. Set to none and leave the URL blank to clear the CRON job. Example: 14:25. (Default: empty = do not run daily cron)

Checking your server, PHP and MySQL to ensure the character set is correct will go a long way toward importing special characters like registration characters.

Additional Import Data field headers

Posted by cici in Our Add Ons, Professional

If you have the Power add-on  for the Self managed WPSLP or if you have the Professional Level MySLP SaaS plan, you will have the ability to import data fields via a properly formatted csv file.  All columns MUST have a header row with  the correct  field name.   All fields are short text fields, up to 255 characters, unless otherwise noted.  The header text is NOT case sensitive.

If you are using the category  functionality of Power you may want to import and assign a category slug on the fly.  The header field name is:

category (or plural categories).

If you wish to import and assign more than one category  per location , you will need to use a comma-separated list for the data field  (category).  Example: My location has more than one category associated with it, I want to indicate it is a hotel,restaurant, and has music.  Category  for that location would show under the column with the header row “category”…. hotel,restaurant,music

Alternatively, to define parent/child relationships , i.e.  hierarchical categories , use a double colon as the separator Example the Parent is Facility, the child is showroom.

Facility::Showroom.

User Interface Settings for WPSLP plug-in

Posted by cici in Advanced, General, Professional, User Interface

Settings that impact how JavaScript works on your site.  Note, if you subscribe to the MySLP SaaS, you will  not see a General tab. With the MySLP we  take care of this for you!  The My Store Locator Plus service is a fully-managed application that works with any website or mobile development platform.

UI jQuery Version –

reflects the jQuery version that is currently used with  the Store Locator Plus version  you are using. The SLP jQuery versions are in compliance with the WordPress minimal version requirements.

Force Load JavaScript

 

This settings forces the Store Locator Plus JavaScript (slp.js) to be loaded when your WordPress Theme header is loaded. This is NOT the way to go.  It is recommended that you turn OFF “Force Load JavaScript” and instead contact your theme author. See Troubleshooting for more information

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Troubleshooting Large scale Exports/Imports

Posted by cici in FAQ, Locations, Our Add Ons, Power Add On, Professional, Troubleshooting

Issue: Exports/Imports Incomplete

Multiple large-scale exports (export function is available with Power Add-on ) have been tested on the Store Locator Plus dev sites. On a relatively small server, a virtual machine with 2GB RAM running CentOS 6, we  have been able to export 10,000 locations within 15 minutes with no issues. Special characters and extended data have also exported without issue.

If you are experiencing  issues there are several things to check that can cause problems during an export:

Web Server Process Limits

Apache, and nginx  have per-process limits. This is built into the web server to prevent “runaway” processes that eat up all of the CPU and memory on the server over time. On shared servers this limit is very low and typically allows 30 seconds to 2 minutes of processing time. Large data sets can use up to 5 minutes or more of processing time. Make sure your server has a high enough limit to allow the entire data export to complete execution.

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Q. We are developing a new website and want to move the content can I add the plug-in data we already have, into the new website?

Posted by cici in FAQ, for WordPress, Professional

A. If you are moving something like a staging/test site to a new site and want to bring everything over intact , the Store Locator Plus author strongly recommends looking into the WordPress backup tool Vault Press, or better ,  Jet Pack.   One of the features included , besides real-time incremental backups of your site with restore points, is the ability to restore the site to an alternate site.

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Q. What is the purpose of ranking under category manager?

Posted by cici in FAQ, Our Add Ons, Professional, Results, Settings

Category ranking is a feature when you are using the Power Add-on  (for the self managed WPSLP plugin) or the Professional or higher level  subscription for MYSLP SaaS  with the category manager. The rank is used to sort the categories which will affect the map marker that is used when a location has been assigned more than one category. Following the page ranking paradigm set by WordPress, the rank field is a simple numeric weighting for the categories. This extended data attribute for categories makes it easy to re-arrange the “weight” of categories for map marker selection without mangling category slugs. The lower the number, the higher the precedence for the map marker.

The option to set a category rank can be found under the Store Locator Plus Categories tab.

Tables and Category Data System

Posted by cici in Our Add Ons, Professional

Table

There are components of the Power Add-on that use the built-in WordPress category system involving several tables.   When moving sites over or combining sites, whether it be from a staging site, or  an older site  to a live site , getting the data in wp_slp_tagalong to match up with a pre-existing site that has pre-existing category data (taxonomies) will be a chore.

For example,

Under a Current site , there may have been an assigned Category “A” ID # 3 at the time the category was created in the taxonomy table but  Live may already be using that ID, therefore when you create a  Category “A” it may be assigned ID #19.

In order to “just move tagalong /categories over” you would need to edit every entry in the “wp_slp_tagalong” table and change ID # 3 to ID #19. To do so, you need to first let WordPress create all of the categories (you could do this with a category-only import) second look up all the ID numbers of the assigned categories, third edit the wp_slp_tagalong exported data from Current to change all of the ID numbers from the “old” WordPress site to be the ID# assigned on the “new (Live)” WordPress site. If you only have 2 or 3 categories it may not be a chore but it can get out-of-hand very quickly. If you make any editing mistakes you will have various issues.

WordPress table descriptions can be found under the WordPress Codex page Database Descriptions

The two tables that would be employed by WordPress when creating or maintaining a category:

wp_terms = the category information itself

wp_term_taxonomy = the metadata that tells WordPress about different category groupings, in other words “this category is for posts”, “this category is for Store Locator Plus locations”, “this category is for videos”, etc. You will not need to export/import this but you WILL need to know what the old (Current) system assigned as the SLP Locations taxonomy ID and what it is on the new WP system. When you export wp_terms from the old system you will need to edit that export and change the taxonomy ID from what it was on Current to what it is on Live.