Yes, it’s another post about SimpleMap… I swear that other development insights and code snippets will be in my posts in the near future, but for now SimpleMap is taking up most of my dev time. This is more of an announcement and invitation for suggestions than anything else.

What I have planned for the next release, so far, is the following:

• Make latitude & longitude directly editable in the Manage DB screen
• Prevent address from overwriting manually entered latitude & longitude
• Fix bug where choosing a state of “None” messes up the directions link and shows in the map display
• Add ability to enter custom state/province values (this might replace the existing drop-down list)
• Fix/prevent all issues with displaying the map overlays (info bubbles, markers, etc.) that are caused by a theme’s CSS
• Fix sizing of the info bubble so it expands properly when a location name takes up more than one line
• Add ability to automatically load all locations, regardless of distance from the default location
• Add ability to change the number of results returned (currently it is limited to 20), including choice to have no limit
• Add new phrases to the main translation file (.POT file) and include new translations with the official release

Also, the ability to add a location by clicking on the map (instead of entering an address or latitude/longitude) might be coming in the next release. WebMago has volunteered to write this code for the plugin, so whether it’s in the next release will mostly depend on timing.

One issue I won’t be addressing in the next release will be the performance of the plugin when importing large CSV files (more than 200 records). I’ve already poured a lot of hours into trying to figure out a new solution, and I ran into a dead end. (Anyone who might have ideas on this—I would LOVE to hear from you! Let me know if you’d like to help or offer some advice, and I’ll give you more details on where I ended up with that code.)

Are there any other bugs people have found, or any other features that could be better than they are? I welcome any and all feedback!