New Maps Feature – Early Access!

• andy

  said

  In the Destination and Directory area. There are options at the bottom of the edit screen for maps.

  The inclusion of posts and pages will be part of the add-on plugin “Advanced Maps” which we’ve already started work on.

• glober

  said

  Good job, the map seem work very good.

  If I can make a suggestion…Place a « hover » on pins for directory items for a rapid and judicious choice, and I think that pins are little too big because if the directory items are closer, the pins are juxtaposed and does not appearing clearly.

  Sorry for my english, actually, I learn the language ;o)

  Good continuation

• mauiguidebook

  said

  Not sure what I’m doing wrong, but I still have just a field for “Google map URL” – I was under the impression that this dev got rid of that in place of lat/long fields?

• andy

  said

  Maybe you didn’t update the plugin? Uninstall and delete the current Travel Destinations plugin and the new one should prompt you to install.

  I gave it a “1.x.-beta” version number so the automatic system to detecting new versions might not recognize it as newer.

• mauiguidebook

  said

  Yup. That was it.

  Great job Andy. I love it so far. Really wish this had blog post support! Any idea of eta on “Advanced Maps” I’m gladly first in line to pay whatever you guys decide to charge for it.

• mauiguidebook

  said

  I think I found a bug :

  when in Destination Edit, if:

  “Pins”->”Include directory items” is unchecked, click the “Map” icon on the destination page has no effect.

• glober

  said

  If the case « Show map on page load » is checked, the map appear with no function but if the case is unchecked, the problem don’t exist.

  I’ve the same problem than mauiguidebook.

  just a spelling error: Dispaly -> Display ;o)

• gamma911

  said

  Thanks for the beta access:

  I found:
  When you have show map on page load you get the map fine but you can’t interact with it until you click the map link twice. Once to disable it and show the default image and once to reenable it. I would expect one click on map allows you to interact with it or interaction by default.

  I’ve also added location details to an item in the directory and that shows correctly on that items map, but it also shows the pins of the parent destination with no option to disable that. It might get confusing when a user is trying to see where that destination / attraction is, but the map has other pins as well.

• andy

  said

  @glober Thanks for the suggestion for hover actions and smaller pins. I’ll see how a smaller pin looks. I think most maps avoid hover actions because of the possible flickering that you’d see with many pins in a small area. It’s could be pretty overwhelming. I think Google takes the same approach to require a click. There might also be impacts on drag events, I’m not sure about that. I’ll check on the issue with show map on page load. I didn’t notice a problem when developing but I will investigate this. Good catch on the spelling error. Thanks!

  @mauiguidebook Thanks again for the feedback. Nice find on the “Include directory items” being unchecked. It looks like there is a JavaScript error when that is disabled. We’ll get that fixed today. The “Advanced Maps” plugin is probably a couple weeks out. We did already start working on it, but like this addition, we want to make sure it’s going to be great. We will continue to work on it and let you know when there is something to see.

  @gamma911 Thanks for the information. It sounds like we need to fix the map CSS on first load. That’s likely why it can’t be accessed. Probably just a missing class that’s not present until after toggling the map display once. Did you try disabling the option to show a pin for the destination, in the destination edit screen? It’s assumed that if you want the destination to have a pin it should continue to show through the entire destination area. You can set each destination to have no pin representing the parent location, only the child destinations and directories will appear.

  Thanks for all the great feedback. We will get these things fixed up and if time allows an update to the theme with these new map features could be released by tomorrow.

• andy

  said

  I spent a good bit of time yesterday finalizing the maps features. I’m about to package them up and prepare the next update to GoExplore! which will include these updates.

  We have a lot of small fixes and updates in the theme that are also going to be included in the theme. I’ll try and get the demo site updated tonight to the latest version and to include examples of the maps. Thanks to everyone that helps test the new features!

• mauiguidebook

  said

  Another bug – but this seems to not only be map specific (I mentioned it many weeks ago, forgive me if the past mention was acted upon and it is just not high enough priority to make it in the updates yet.)

  You can not use special characters such as apostrophes, quotes, etc – even by escaping or using html entities, or even various forms of html entities representing said characters in the “intro text” field. Using any special character, or similar representation, in any way appears to break display of the content in the map thumbnail (among other places throughout theme.)

• andy

  said

  @mauiguidebook Please open new topics for unrelated issues or reply in the previously started, but related, topic. It’s really helpful. Thanks!

• andy

  said

  The theme update, v1.2.0, which includes the Travel Destinations plugin v1.1.0 has just gone live on ThemeForest. You can download the update now. I’m going to close this topic since it’s no longer relevant after the release. If you have questions or need help, as always, please start a new topic and we’ll do our best to help.

  And…

  Don’t forget to rate GoExplore! on ThemeForest. We need more of those 5 stars!