[Plugin: Basic Google Maps Placemarks] Categories feature requests

I’ve been trying to use the BGMP categories and running into all sorts of practical difficulties. Here are some things I had expected I would be able to do with the categories that I was not able to:

1. Toggle categories on the maps on the fly. I understand this would require changing the way the plugin handles categories, but not being able to do this dynamically (that is, with Javascript) makes the categories almost useless. I understand they are provided in their current incarnation with the idea that you could use them to create multiple maps for a given site, but I think it’s probably much more common to have one map that allows you to filter things on and off.

2. Have [bgmp-list] also respond to categories. This seems mandatory no matter how you slice it. [bgmp-list] is basically useless if you use categories, because it does not filter by them at all. This means that even if you did use the categories in the way they were imagined (multiple maps for a single site), you would be essentially prohibited from using [bgmp-list] as well, because it can’t be made to recognize what category page it is on.

One additional feature request unrelated to categories:

3. There should be an easy, plugin-independent way of specifying a new default image. At the moment I can do this by dropping in a new default-marker.png into my plugin directory, but this gets reset every time the plugin updates. A huge pain. There are also the “featured image” designations but setting each and every one of these manually is a huge pain when you have lots of placemarks, and all you want is a new default.

What I’d really love is to be able to call some sort of simple function or set a variable in my theme’s functions.php, which would then be checked before a default image was used. That way it would be immune to being broken just because I upgraded my plugin.

It would also be great if one could set category specific icons in this way, but that’s less mission-critical.

Thanks for the work on this. I think it’s aaalllllmost there in terms of a really robust WP mapping plugin — these last few thing are all I’d need to be 100% happy. ??

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/basic-google-maps-placemarks/