Settings Page

You can find the settings page under Settings in the WordPress dashboard, listed as OS Maps.

The first and most important setting is the API key obtained previously from the OS registration process. Copy this from Data Hub project page.

The remainder of the settings have usable default values so you can come back to these later if you wish and get started with inserting a map. Most of the settings are self-explanatory.

Default Settings

The first few settings relate to the defaults used with all maps, namely the height and width of the map, the elevation profile height, the initial zoom level. You can also set defaults for track colour and width used for displaying GPX or KML route files.

The latest release of OS maps explorer generates GPX files with embedded waypoints, which show up as markers on your map. You can suppress GPX waypoints globally from here, or you can do it on a map-by-map basis in the shortcode.

You can override these defaults for individual maps using shortcode attributes.

Global Settings

These settings will affect all maps on your site and (mostly) cannot be overridden with shortcode attributes.

Premium data use

You can choose who gets to see maps with premium data: Everyone (default), logged-in users, or no-one. Users who do not have access to premium data will see instead the Open Data maps which still offer a good level of detail but not to the same standard as the Landranger and Explorer maps.

If you have a membership site, you might allow only logged-in users to see the premium data. If you don’t need the full colour OS maps for your purpose, you can select no-one to get just the Open Data maps.

There is a shortcode attribute to override this for individual maps, see Advanced Attributes.

Full screen

Maps can now have a full screen button, great for seeing maximum map area. You can also enable this for the user levels shown above.

When the map is not shown full screen, mouse-wheel zoom also requires Ctrl to be pressed and on mobile devices, touch dragging requires two-finger drag. This ensures that the map doesn’t break the page navigation. In full screen mode you can zoom with the mouse-wheel and drag with one finger on mobile devices.

Open data style

There are three available styles for Open Data: Road, Outdoor and Light. Choose the style which suits your needs. If you’re using premium data, this style will only be used for the high detail zoom levels beyond 1:25,000. If you’re not using premium maps, this style will be used for all displays beyond 1:100,000.

There is a shortcode attribute to override this for individual maps, see Advanced Attributes.

Map zoom

The mapping engine supports a wide range of scales from whole UK right through to street level views. In many cases you will not need the extreme zoom out – if your site is about walks in the Brecon Beacons then you probably only need enough zoom out to show that part of South Wales, not the whole UK. On the Global Settings section you can select the maximum and minimum zoom levels you want to allow.

Several map styles are shown in 2 resolutions, the resampled version just being a zoomed-out version of the same map.

This is the list of available zoom levels, along with the number used to identify each one in the shortcode attributes if required.

0. Whole UK
1. Half UK
2. 1:1M
3. 1:1M, zoom
4. 1:250,000
5. 1:250,000, zoom
6. 1:50,000 Landranger
7. 1:50,000 Landranger, zoom
8. 1:25,000 Leisure
9. 1:25,000 Leisure, zoom
10. 1:3,307 Detail
11. 1:1,654 Detail
12. 1:827 Detail
13. 1:413 Detail

Add download link

Check this box to add a download link to the associated GPX or KML file immediately below the map. This can be useful for sites offering walking and cycling routes. The link just follows the same styling as other links on your site. If you want to change the styling refer to the Custom CSS section.

Note that a link will only be shown if there is one GPX or KML file selected. For multiple files you will need to add the links manually.