jQuery Google Maps Store Locator Plugin

This jQuery plugin takes advantage of Google Maps API version 3 to create an easy to implement store locator. No back-end programming is required, you just need to feed it KML, XML, or JSON data with all the location information. How you create the data file is up to you. I originally created this for a company that didn’t have many locations, so I just used a static XML file. You will need to geocode your locations beforehand or use a geocoding API service if you want to try to do it on the fly. The reason for this is that all free geocoding APIs have strict limits that would easily be exceeded. In the end, you're much better off storing the coordinates versus having to look them up for each location on each request.