Best Maps Plugin on the Market

  • Lots of great features, easy to use, and excellent support! The pro version has a lot of added features, and is inexpensive, especially when compared with other plugins and mapping services.

    The map layer customization feature is awesome and anyone can use it. I’m running a site with 52 custom maps and (at this time, we are adding every day) 37,842 markers.

    A couple things I learned.

    1. The Map Marker Google Geo Coding feature works really well. Being that we were adding a lot of markers, we used “https://geoservices.tamu.edu/” for geocoding. You can geocode 20,000 markers on this service for $20.00. However, if the zip was not included, the Geocodes were not exact, so we excluded records without zips after the first couple of batches and ran them through the Map Marker Google Geo Coding function…and the Geocodes were exact.

    2. The Bulk Import/Export feature is awesome! It can take a bit of time to upload if you are geocoding the records when uploading…we found that it was approx 193 seconds for a batch of 500 records. If the records are already geocoded, you can load 2000 records in 20 seconds or less.

    The Export feature is very useful when bulk editing is needed. For example, we assigned a batch of 800+ records to the wrong layer. I exported that layers records, sorted them on a spread sheet, changed the layer number and upload them back to the server in less than 5 minutes. Nice!

    3. The features I would like to see added in the future:
    a. While the creating a map with multiple layers feature is good, if you have layers with large quantities of markers, the resulting map is too slow.

    The solution? An ability to assign markers to more than one layer.

    b. We have been able to customize the appearance of the popup windows with some basic css, but it would be really nice to see a simple feature that allows for customizing the popups in the settings area…no biggy, but if you are not comfortable with basic css, then this could be very helpful

    4. We have a bunch of maps that were created in Google Maps Engine Pro. At this time there is not way to load these maps to Maps Marker Pro (unless I am missing something). The reason? The map layers can only be exported as KML, but there is no feature for importing KML in Maps Marker Pro. Not sure what this entails…but would be a nice option.

    We tested (1) Mapify (didn’t work out of the box and the support is not good), looked at (2) iMaps, but the cost for us, because we have maps with over 2000 markers, was $595….and the maps reside on their servers…..so you have no control over what happens to them in the future…and finally, I don’t want my maps controlled by a Mainland Chinese company…we corresponded with the techs and the service attitude was, “It’s custom”, send us the specs and we will give you a price…(they wanted $1500 to add a driving directions link to the popups…HAHA)

    Again, great plugin, great price, great service!

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  • Thanks a lot for your great review!

    Some remarks regarding your feedback:
    ad 1. “geocoding via https://geoservices.tamu.edu/”: I have put this on the roadmap for evaluation – if this service has a compatible API, I might include it in a later relase as an alternative for Google Places geocoding.

    2. “bulk editing via import/export”: please also have a look at the tools section within my plugin where you can also perform some batch actions, like moving markers to other layer maps for example.

    ad 3a. “slow maps with large quantities of markers”: the issue here is that with some thousands of markers, the GeoJSON array needed for layer maps is several MBs. I have already optimized this as best as I could, anyway currently I do not see any short term optimizations that could be further added. In the long run, perhaps selectively loading of markers could be a solution (only load markers which are visible in the current view) – anyway I cant tell you when that feature will be available yet.

    ad 3b “popup customizing”: not sure, which settings would be helpful here. Let me know what you were thinking of.

    ad 4 “KML support” – display of KML files is on the roadmap with a rather higher priority and will definitely be supported in the future (as before, I cant promise any release dates though).

    if you have any further feedback, let me know!
    best,

    Robert

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