In the spirit of continuously improving our store locator service, we regularly make changes to fix software bugs that have been reported or to add new features that have been requested by our customers. Individually these wouldn't necessitate an individual blog post to announce so we're bundling up the changes into a single list and we'll periodically announce these changes via our Blog.
OK, here goes:
New setting for Sentence Capitalization when running Bulk Imports
When running a Bulk Imports we check the Store Name and each of the Address fields to see whether they are ALL UPPER CAPS or all lower caps. If they are, we transform the text to be in Sentence Case - that is, the first letter of each word is capitalized. We do this because this generally looks better in the locator and matches what most people expect to see. In some cases however, this isn't what you need so we added a Setting under the Import Settings section of our Settings page to disable this.
More tolerant Google Sheet format
Under our old import system, the header row in the Google Sheet had to exactly match the header row in our import template file. We've made some changes so now you can remove any headers that you don't need, they can be in any order and any header entries that you add that we don't recognise will be ignored instead of blowing up the import process as they did before.
Faster Bulk Exports
Some of our larger customers (over 10,000 locations) were finding that the Bulk Export to Excel feature was taking forever to run. We've made a bunch of improvements to this process including switching over to a new Excel export library and this should mean exports are much quicker for everyone.
Added Store Name type to Custom Elements
You can now create a Custom Element which is of the Store Name type which will automatically link to the relevant map marker and trigger it to display. This is particularly useful where you would like the location name to be in a different language or character set.
That's all for now. We'll bundle up the next set of minor updates in part 2 coming soon.