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Making Maps Easier

Easier Maps

We’ve been spending the last few weeks making it easier for you to add maps to your events and locations.

In June, we added the “Get From Address” button which, upon clicking, auto-fills the Latitude and Longitude fields based on what you enter into the Address field. This saves you from having to visit a third-party website to get the coordinates. Then, Google began requiring an API Key (for new sites) so we added a setting in the plugin for entering your key and wrote a guide on how to create your key with Google.

Now, with the release of Church Content 1.7.1, we have embedded an interactive preview map directly in the admin area. When you click “Get From Address”, a map appears so you can get an idea of what your map will look like before publishing. This is especially helpful for choosing zoom level. And you can drag / click the map to adjust the marker, which may come in handy for churches in rural areas where Google’s map data is not yet perfect.

The sum of all this is that you can quickly and more easily add maps to your events and locations without having to leave your WordPress admin area. To update the Church Content plugin to version 1.7.1, go to Dashboard > Updates in your WordPress admin area.

12 Comments

    • I’m glad it was helpful. Google definitely made the setup process unfriendly for non-developers (and even developers, by my own experience). Hopefully that will change, or if there ends up being some way we can make it a little more automated then we’ll look at that.

  1. Great addition, thanks!

    As a future feature request, would it be possible to have a default location set, so you don’t have to change it all the time? A lot of my events happen at the Church itself, and having to set the location every time can be a bit time consuming, better to have the Church as default and only have to change it if the event is elsewhere.

    Keep the updates coming! :)

    • Thank you for sharing what would be useful to you. That’s a good idea. We’ve had requests for the ability to select previously entered locations. I’ll save your idea of a default with that feature request and add your vote.

      For now, if you want to save time for an event that takes place at the church, you could leave the location details blanks. Visitors will assume that the event is at the church if no other place is specified. If they are new, they can refer to your location link or the map in the footer, homepage, etc. (depending on theme).

  2. Thanks Steve, thats a great idea to just leave the address/location blank. But, please mark me down as a +1 for having a default location!

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