Want to show your website users the locations of your business or multiple outlets? How about giving website users information like contact details, opening times, street view and realtime travel and directions for these locations? The new Locator stack could be what you need!
Sure you can use any other map addon for RapidWeaver, but that tends to be rather boring. In this day and age of AR (augmented reality), many modern businesses are beginning to embrace new technology to give customers realtime location information. And it needs to be something that looks and works great on all newer web browsers.
On the surface, this is a store locator. Users to your website or webapp can type their current location in the search box (auto location is supported too on SSL) and see a list of locations sorted by nearest first. Locator is using the latest Google Maps API v3 and a clever geocoder to query customer locations against your database. A whole host of powerful settings exist within Locator, to customise the user interface.
Locator supports unlimited locations. For example you could be a single, independent guitar shop on the edge of town or a global manufacturer selling products available worldwide in thousands of different stores. This location data can either be generated from a Google Earth KLM export (very easy), or you can code it yourself in simple XML format (a bit harder, but recommended). Step-by-step directions only work for XML sources.
The search box and list of locations are totally optional. You can easily toggle these off; meaning that Locator can double as a normal Google Maps stack. Lots of other style options can be changed, including the presentation of locations in the list, map points, the search box and all label localisations. Many settings to play with.
This stack came about out of need, not desire. Within the RapidWeaver community, a store locator stack has been in demand for a long time. I had a requirement to create a store locator for 2 private clients. Pre-existing map addons fell a long way short of what I wanted. Locator has been meticulously designed, developed and tested for real websites since July.
Please have patience! This is NOT a typical stack you drag and drop into a webpage and instantly have a store locator in less than 30 seconds. This is an expert-grade stack intended for semi professional RapidWeaver users. Carefully read the instructions and create a Google Maps API key. Then generate your map data and feed it into Locator. Adjust the settings accordingly (to suit your requirements) and preview the output. You should finish with an incredibly sophisticated store locator powered by Google Maps. One which easily beats the price and feature set of Wordpress equivalents!
As always, a free demo version is provided for download. You can use this to fully evaluate Locator without time or feature constraints, before committing to a purchase. Stacks 3.5 is required.
You can use this stack in as many personal and commercial websites as you want. If you are building websites for clients, this stack could make you their favourite web designer!
Until Saturday 2nd December 2017, Locator is 50% off, as part of our wider Black Friday promo. That’s a lot of stack for $10 USD!