The WordPress Google Mapping Plugin allows your site to show locations using Google mapping, showcase featured images from your geo-located posts, present GPX tracks, GPX elevation graphs, record a country against your posts, and much much more…
I like to think this mapping plugin is amongst the very best available for WordPress. But don’t take my word for it, here’s what customers say, “… the price of your script is too cheap …” and “… this plugin is very complete and original.” Plus I’m always on the lookout for new innovative features (and bugs to squash) – so get in contact if you have any you’d like to see.
Example
Here’s a working example of what the plugin can achieve for your site:
Navigation steps will show here...
For reference the shortcode used to generate this map is:
[post_map type="ROADMAP" zoom="9" current="on" link="off" style="width: 100%; height: 400px; border: 1px solid lightGray;" all="on" weather="on" temperature="C" traffic="on" directions="on" distance="M" panel="on" photos="no" fullscreen="off"]
Example GPX Trace Map
For reference the markup used to generate this map is:
<a href='/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Staveley-Geo.gpx'>Staveley Geo</a>
Buy the Plugin
Approximately one hour after payment your plugin will be emailed as a compressed ZIP to you PayPal payment address.
Features
The list of features is extensive:
 |
Using the Location section (you may alter the title of this section) of the WordPress post editing page to create and manage your location data. You may:
There are more details for editing your locations available here:
|
 |
Free upgrades for life!. As the plugin gains more features you can be sure you will always have access to those features without any additional cost. |
 |
Automatically play a random slideshow of featured images from your geo-located posts and venues. The map pans dynamically to show the location marker of the post for each image. |
 |
Record the latitude & longitude of one or more locations against your posts. Using the  and  buttons allow additional locations to be added or removed. (Remember to click the  icon to set the focus of geo-location.)
|
 |
The plugin has several advantages over other WordPress mapping plugins. For example, it doesn’t unduly load your web server, making full use of the power of the user’s browser. This also makes content more interactive, for example hovering over elevation graphs shows the data at that point of the graph dynamically. |
 |
Weather and Clouds layers may be shown on maps. The temperature scale, °C or °F, may also be set. |
 |
Get directions between two locations on a map. The directions features allow you to travel from any point  to point  . Just type the location names, e.g. “London†to “Cambridgeâ€. You can also use your “Current Location†(note some browsers won’t support this) as a start point and travel to any of the markers on your map by clicking any marker to set the end point. Tick the show navigation step markers checkbox and a series of markers will be added to the route to provide step by step navigation instructions. You may also opt to show the navigation steps below the map with the panel shortcode parameter.
|
 |
Google’s Traffic layer may be displayed to provide extra information to help plan your routes. |
 |
Posts with location data are highlighted with an indication of the quality of the location data:  – the Latitude & Longitude are OK;  – only one Latitude or Longitude value is provided;  – the Latitude & Longitude are OK, but the administrator has blocked plotting.
|
 |
Automatic clustering of map markers at lower zoom levels to de-clutter the map. Clusters are shown with colour coded icons:      . The hotter the colour the more markers are clustered.
|
 |
Provide a table of locations associated with a post using the shortcode [locations_table]. There is one optional parameter title. This is the title to display before the table of locations (default is Venues or your customised name).
|
 |
The plugin remembers the last map-type (ROADMAP, SATELLITE, HYBRID, or TERRAIN) shown.
|
 |
The size, position, etc. of each map on your pages is customisable using CSS settings (defaults are initially provided).For example, within the [post_map] shortcode you may want to force a certain style such as have the map shown with a green border (style=“border: 2px solid green;â€). Whereas your theme may normally be asserting a grey, black, or another border colour.Note, the options page provides fields to enter CSS for each type of map (VENUE, POST, GPX, and ELEVATION). If your WordPress theme does not immediately show the maps it is essential that this CSS sets, as a minimum, the size of the canvas. Try something like: width: 100%; height: 300px; border: 1px solid #ddd; margin: 5px; to kick-off.
|
 |
Within the WordPress post editing form you may search using geo-location by address, place name, etc. |
 |
Hovering over any marker on the map quickly shows a popup of that marker’s name. While clicking the marker will show a summary popup for the marker including: post title, excerpt, and country. Featured image thumbnails can also be optionally included in the popup summary. |
 |
A limitation of Google mapping is that each map-type has a maximum level of zoom. For example, the most limited level of zoom is often found with the TERRAIN style of map. Switching to SATELLITE may allow a higher level of zooming, especially in popular urban areas like cities. However, regardless of map-type, sooner or later it will be impossible to zoom the mapping any further. At this point if you have multiple locations mapped the clustering of the markers will be impossible to resolve. The plugin deals with this problem by offering a tabbed summary popup, one tab for each location. Just click on the cluster to see the tabs.
|
 |
Make use of a number of template tags to optionally integrate mapping in to your site. These are:
|
 |
Upload GPX files, say from your GPS device, to automatically show the tracks. This simple yet powerful mechanism allows uploaded GPX files to automatically show the trace of a route. GPX files may be uploaded using the normal WordPress media upload and then embedded within a post. For example, using this markup, <a href='http://your-domain/path/file.gpx'>GPX Data</a>, will automatically present a Google map showing the route described by the GPX file.The GPX trace will show any named waypoints with a small green marker –  . If the post that the GPX is shown in has location data the location will be shown with a purple marker –  .Accompanying maps of GPX tracks, graphing of the elevation along the path of the track may be displayed. Graphs are built dynamically by the user’s browser (so unlike some other plugins they do not cause lots of PHP processing on your server or blow PHP’s memory limits). You may suppress the elevation graph for a specific track by including elevation='off' in the markup. For example, <a href='http://your-domain/path/file.gpx' elevation='off'>GPX Data</a>
|
 |
If your browser supports it, and you have allowed your browser to share your current location, the plugin can show where you are currently located. The marker for this is:  This may be useful when writing posts, or just on one of your pages to show your users where they are.Of course it’s also super useful to get directions from where you are now to one of your marked locations using the navigation directions feature described above! |
 |
Within the WordPress “visual” and “text” editors a shortcode for [post_map] can be quickly inserted using a quicktag button. In the “text” editor the button is  and in the “visual” editor the button is  .There are several more additional parameters that can be added to the shortcode:
|
 |
Support for mapping of JPG photographs with geo-tagged EXIF data. The EXIF location data may have been added to the photo’s meta-data automatically when the picture was taken by a GPS enabled camera, manually, or by photo management software like Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s iPhoto.Thumbnails of the photos are shown in a popup when hovering over photo markers. However, please note that a default WordPress installation does not preserve EXIF data when uploading and scaling images. Therefore the plugin will not have access to location meta-data in photos uploaded before the plugin was installed and the Save image location data option was set. Photos that have had their geo-tagged location data successfully read will show a tick ( ) in the Geo Tag column of the WordPress media library list.
|
select UK from the drop down.
. This marker may be dragged to a new location.For reference the shortcode used to generate this map is:
[post_map type="SATELLITE" style="width: 100%; height: 250px; border: 1px solid lightGray;" all="off" photos="on" traffic="off" weather="off" directions="off" link="on" search="on"]
 |
Associate post categories with your custom markers so that all posts in a certain category are shown on the map with that marker. (Note, if a post is tagged with more than one category the first is selected.) |
 |
A sidebar widget providing navigation to posts from a given country. The widget has a single option, one of your WordPress pages. When set to one of your pages a link is shown under the popup list of countries that links to that page. Typically on that page you will use the [venues_map] shortcode to display a map showing all of your location data.
|
 |
A special page available in the WordPress administration menu to review numbers of posts from each country. |
 |
The Venues Map Page options allows configuration of whether location data, for posts and/or venues, are included in the standards compliant Geo RSS feed generated by the plugin. (Note, add ?feed=venues to your blog’s main URL to access the location RSS feed. You may wish to use this to submit geo content to Google as a geo site map.)
|
 |
Posts (and Venues) can be tagged as being associated with a country. The flags of 77 countries from  Australia to  Wales to the  US are included. So, for example, you might tag: the country that the post writes about; where your last great holiday was; a business trip; or event took place in; the location you are writing the post from; etc. Your imagination is the limit!Country icons can also be clicked to list all posts from that country. Of course you may also add to (or delete form) the flags provided to customise your installation. The flags are in the wp-content/plugins/post-country/Flags/ directory.
|
 |
For Venue posts flags can also be used as markers on the map. So for example it’s easy to create a series of posts (Venues), marked on the map with flags, for all the countries you have visited. |
 |
A number of customised markers are included. Examples of these have been used as the bullets in this list! Plus, the Adobe Photoshop template (PSD) used to create new custom markers is included. |
 |
And finally, I am always keen to extend the plugin’s capabilities, so why not ask for more features. You never know they might well get added, and as there’s a promise of updates for life what have you got to lose… 😀 |
Other Plugins
Many of the plugins, widgets, and other extensions used on this site have been designed and developed specifically. I’m quite (modestly) pleased with them. 😳 Why not use them on your WordPress powered site too? Many of these extensions are free. Please consider, especially if you are using one of the free plugins, a donation to aid on-going development if you find them useful. 😉