A style pasted into the file
$map_style_string='[{"featureType":"water", …'
Unreadable, copied from site to site, and impossible to change once without touching every file that holds a copy.
The controls
Map style options
Grouped the same way they are grouped in the file, in the same order — after Spot,
which is not part of the block but decides what one option in it can do. Open a group,
change a value, and the map redraws. Every value shown as empty means “leave
the line blank and let Google decide”.
The one setting that is not on this page
Road, water and label colours live in the Map ID
The old map sections carried a long $map_style_string — a wall of JSON that
recoloured every feature of the map. The new section does not. Those colours now live in
the Google Cloud console, saved against a Map ID, and
config.php only names the ID.
A style the map points at
$googlemap_api_map_id = "2b2f496316d3104ea334ff9b";
The style is edited visually in the Cloud console and applies to every site using that ID, without a release. The same ID is also what makes the modern pins work at all.
What this means for you. If the roads and water need a different colour,
that is a new Map ID, not a config change — ask the team to create one, then paste
it into $googlemap_api_map_id. Everything else on this page is yours to set
per site. Google's
Cloud-based maps styling overview
shows how those styles are created.
Paste a different Map ID into the field in Map above to compare two cloud styles side by side.
Watch out
The pin has four looks, and only one of them wins
The pin settings do not blend. They are checked in a fixed order and the first one that is filled in decides the whole pin — anything below it is ignored, silently.
-
1
$googlemap_api_pin_card = true→ the HTML cardA small card with your text and logo. Wins over everything, including a pin image.
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2
$googlemap_api_pin_imageis set → that imageYour own graphic replaces the pin shape. Pin colours and the glyph no longer apply.
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3
Any
pin_color/pin_glyph_*/pin_scale→ a styled pinGoogle's pin shape in your colours. The one to reach for first — it stays crisp at every zoom and needs no asset.
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4
Everything empty → Google's red pin
The default. Perfectly fine on a site that has no strong brand colour to spend here.
In the Pin group above, the settings that are currently being ignored are dimmed and tagged. That tag is the only warning you will ever get — the file itself says nothing.
New in TAB-526
Where the pin click actually goes
$googlemap_api_pin_click says whether the pin opens a link.
$googlemap_api_pin_link says which link — and the info window's
“Get directions” row uses the same answer, so the pin and the box can never point at two
different places. It takes three values, and the section resolves them once, in this order.
$googlemap_api_pin_link = "https://…"
Used exactly as written. Anything starting http:// or https://
counts; anything else — a bare domain, a javascript: value — is rejected by
the scheme check and falls through to the generated link below.
$googlemap_api_pin_link = "directions"
A Google Maps Get directions request instead of a place page:
/maps/dir/?api=1&destination=…&destination_place_id=…. The place ID is
the spot's google_place_id, which pins the destination to the exact
business rather than to a name that may match several. Without a place ID this
silently becomes "default" — check the Spot group at the
top of this column before choosing it.
$googlemap_api_pin_link = "default"
The generated Google Maps search for the venue —
/maps/search/?api=1&query=… built from the address, city, state and zip.
This is also what every unrecognised value resolves to, so a typo costs you the
directions link, never the link itself.
What this means for you. "directions" is the better default
on a venue people travel to — it saves a tap and it removes the wrong-branch problem — but
it is only as good as the spot's google_place_id. Confirm the spot has one,
and remember that pin_click = "none" does not switch this off: the
info window's link still uses it.
The shipped config sets $googlemap_api_pin_link = "directions". The
Pin group above writes the same line, and dims the row on the one occasion nothing
can reach it — the pin decorative and the info window's link row switched off.
When you are happy
Getting it back into the file
-
1
Copy the changed lines
The panel under the map lists only what you moved away from the shipped values. Use All style options if you would rather replace the whole block.
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2
Paste them under
# googlemap_apiinconfig.phpReplace the matching lines — do not add a second copy of a variable. The last assignment in the file is the one that counts, which makes a duplicate very hard to spot later.
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3
Check it on the real site at three widths
The map has its own height at each breakpoint, and a pin that is comfortable on desktop can cover half a phone screen. The device buttons above the map do the same check here.