The Nearby Now plugin for Joomla!
The Nearby Now plugin for Joomla! is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla! Project. It is not supported or warranted by the Joomla Project or Open Source Matters. The Joomla! logo is used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters the trademark holder in the United States and other countries.
Nearby Now offers three types of fully configurable plugins that enable you to embed Nearby Now data right inside your Joomla! site.
Here are the plugins that are currently available:
Nearby Now Recent Reviews
The Nearby Now recent reviews plugin enables you to embed your recent reviews on your Joomla! site. The plugin is configurable so that you can display checkins by city, and state. If you do business in several cities, this is a great way to show recent checkins, for that city, on your city specific page.
To use the recent reviews plugin, grab this short-code, replace the settings to your city and state, and drop it in a new web page or blog post:
{recentreviews city=Mesa|state=AZ|count=10|zoomlevel=10}
Nearby Now Service Area Heat Map
The Nearby Now service area heat map plugins allows you to display your recent checkins, service area, and heat, on a map. The plugin is configurable so that you can display a service area and heat map for a specific city, and recent checkins related to that service area.
To use the service area heat-map plugin, grab this short-code, replace the settings to your city and state, and drop it in a new web page or blog post:
{serviceareamap city=Scottsdale|state=AZ|count=10|zoomlevel=9}
Service Area / Review Combination Map
Our most powerful shortcode, the service area and reviews combination map has three sections that are sure to improve local rankings and help convert visitors.
1. A large interactive service area heat-map combined with review markers.
2. A wide column of your reviews, properly coded so that search engines recognize them as reviews of your business.
3. A narrow column of your check-ins, along with related comments and photos.
Place the combination map on city-specific pages to provide for unique, rich, dynamic, and micro-formatted content that is specific to that city in order to bolster rankings for each city your business services.
To use the Service Area / Review Combination Map plugin, grab this short-code, replace the settings to your city and state, and drop it in a new web page or blog post (refer to the parameters list below for a full list of options):
{serviceareareviewcombo city=Scottsdale|state=AZ|reviewcount=10|checkincount=10|zoomlevel=9}
Parameters
Each short code has several parameters. Some are required and some are optional. Required parameters are indicated with a *.
Recent Reviews
- *city – The name of the city that you want to show reviews for
- *state – The name of the state that you want to show reviews for
- count – The number of recent reviews to display
tags="sales-team, installers"– Optional. If specified, plugin output will be restricted to content created from users with the assigned tags provided.
Service Area Heat Map
- *city – The name of the city that you want to show checkins and a heat map for
- *state – The name of the state that you want to show checkins and a heat map for
- count – The number of recent checkins to display
tags="sales-team, installers"– Optional. If specified, plugin output will be restricted to content created from users with the assigned tags provided.
Service Area / Review Combination Map
- state=FL – Optional. Must be used in conjunction with “city”. Indicates the city and state for which the review and check-in content will be rendered in the markup, and where the map will be centered. If no city and state are specified, review and check-in content will be rendered without respect to its local city/state, and the map center will be calculated based on an approximate center of all reviews.
- city=Orlando – Optional. Must be used in conjunction with “state”. See above.
- showmap=yes – Optional, defaults to “yes”. If specified as anything other than “yes”, then the map will not be displayed, and only the rendered review and check-in content will be shown.
- reviewstart=1 – Optional, defaults to “1”. Indicates the starting review number to render, based on a reverse chronological order, and may be used for paging.
- reviewcount=15 – Optional, defaults to 15. Specifies the number of reviews to render based on a reverse chronological order.
- checkinstart=1 – Optional, defaults to “1”. Indicates the starting check-in number to render, based on a reverse chronological order, and may be used for paging.
- checkincount=25 – Optional, defaults to 25. Specifies the number of check-ins to render based on a reverse chronological order.
- zoomlevel=11 – Optional. Indicates the initial zoom level of the map, and may be a number between 8 and 14, where 8 is a larger area with less detail, and 14 is a small area with more detail. If not specified, Nearby Now will calculate an appropriate zoom level.
- reviewcityurl=http://www.mydomain.com/service-area-[city]-[state] – Optional. If specified, a set of url’s will be rendered under the title “Our Reviews by City”. Each city that has at least one local review will be rendered as a link that fits the specified pattern, where “{city}” will be replaced by the lowercase name of the city, and “{state}” will be replaced by the lowercase two character abbreviation for the state. If a city name has more than one word, hyphens will replace the spaces. In the example above, the url rendered for Fort Worth, Texas will be “http://www.mydomain.com/service-area-fort-worth-tx”.
- mapsize=large – Optional, defaults to “large”. May be “small” to render a small map, “medium” for a bigger map, and “large” for a large map. The containing element of the shortcode dictates the width of the map – this parameter adjusts the height.
- mapscrollwheel=no – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, then the mouse scroll wheel may be used to change the zoom level of the interactive map.
- fblike=no – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, a Facebook like button plugin will be rendered below each rendered review.
- fbcomment=no – Optional, defaults to “no”. If specified as “yes”, a Facebook comment plugin will be rendered below each rendered review.
tags="sales-team, installers"– Optional. If specified, plugin output will be restricted to content created from users with the assigned tags provided.
Google Maps API
Your website may be required to obtain a Google Maps API Key in order to render maps on your web pages. The Google Maps API Key should be saved to your storefront. Here’s how to obtain a Google Maps API Key:
- Login to https://console.developers.google.com/apis/ – you will need to create a free Google account if you do not already have one.
- Navigate to the API Manager: https://console.developers.google.com/apis/library
- From The Google APIs tab, setup the following Google APIs: Google Maps JavaScript API and Google Static Maps API. Click into each one and then click the blue “Enabled” button.
- Once you have enabled the two APIs, click on “credentials:”
- Click on the blue “Create Credentials” button. Give the credentials a name you will remember, such as the company name, or Company and Nearby Now Maps.
- Record the generated Key. This is what you’ll save in your Storefront.
To save the Google Maps API Key to your storefront go to Settings > Company Profile > Google Maps API Key.
