Hi, I am Robert Seyfriedsberger from Vienna in Austria – Mapping geek, open data activist, founder and architect of Maps Marker Pro.

Robert Seyfriedsberger wrote his first line of code on an Amiga 500 and, 31 years and several computer generations later, has no plans to quit coding anytime soon.

„While we believe in the power of openness and its social, political and economic value, we insist that our own, personal data should always be kept private and safely encrypted“. That’s why Maps Marker Pro never stores geolocation data. We use https everywhere, keep up with latest security standards and fiercely document everything on our blog.“

We work hard to ensure that Maps Marker Pro doesn’t only work well, but that how it works is compliant with best practices for ethical coding.

Ethical code

Software with a moral code

We work hard to ensure that Maps Marker Pro doesn’t only work well, but that how it works is compliant with best practices for ethical coding.

Non Expiring License Key

Just like a penguin who mates for life, your license key will be yours until the end of days, without a subscription. To keep access to current updates and support you have to renew anually, but it is your decision.

Data Sovereignty

Your data is exactly that: yours. Only you maintain full control over all your geolocation data. We do not store it, nor does Maps Marker feature data storage on third-party-servers.

Privacy Policy

We value your privacy and hold all your provided information in strict confidence. Find out more in our comprehensive privacy policy.

Security & Encryption

We use secure https encryption everywhere, both on our website and within Maps Marker Pro itself. For all plugin packages a hash value is created and they are digitally signed, so that you can easily verify their data integrity and make sure that no malware has been added.

Bug Bounty Program

Help us fix our blind spots! We’re calling out to security researchers everywhere to help us find vulnerabilities and security issues in our products with our bug bounty program.

Successful Audits

We´ve been successfully audited twice for security issues – ÖNORM 7700 and OWASP TOP 10 – and we make sure to always stay ahead when it comes to meeting the latest security standards.

Anonymous Registration

If you don´t wish to share your real name for the trial version, you don´t have to. Register for a free 30-days trial of Maps Marker Pro anonymously and we´ll like you just as much.

RTL & UTF-8

All characters welcome: We feature full RTL (right-to-left) language support as well as full support for cyrillic, chinese and other characters with UTF-8.

Open Data

We´re proud to work with open data from various providers such as Open Street Map, OGD Vienna Maps and any open map of your choice, because we believe in its social, political and economic value. Therefore, we were labeld with the international Open Data Inside badge.

Documentation

Full disclosure: we´re keen on keeping our work transparent. From basic usage to API tutorials to changelogs, you´ll find it all in our extensive documentation and FAQ.

3 questions to Robert Seyfriedsberger

Origin stories & coding challenges

Maps Marker Pro is available since 11 years. The project has been growing ever since, we’ve been amazed by the feedback and positive response. A huge thank you to you, our users – we count ourselves lucky to be able to work on what we love!

Everyone loves a good origin story. What’s the history behind Maps Marker Pro?

In 2011 I attended an open government data hackathon by the city of Vienna, where my fellow developer and friend Sindre Wimberger introduced me to Javascript mapping library leaflet.js. I had been doing several WordPress projects at that time and was curious whether there was already a leaflet WordPress plugin available. I found a rudimentary one that I could build upon, to display the open government maps of Vienna, as part of the hackathon challenge.

Soon after I thought: Hey, if I can implement OpenStreetMap, this will be useful for the rest of the world, too! So I started started developing Leaflet Maps Marker. I was overwhelmed by the positive response, and the user community grew fast. It all worked out so well that, 1.5 years later, I was able to later add a higher-powered version with Maps Marker Pro, and we’ve been improving it ever since.

What are the biggest challenges in developing a WordPress plugin?

Ensuring compatibility on different hosts and different setups, that’s definitely a challenge. Because this comes up a lot, I built a plugin compatibility check that automatically warns you about known issues and tell you how to fix them quickly.

Another challenge is to keep up with latest security standards. My experience there: always think of fallback scenarios. One time I changed plugin updates to be delivered via https only – which worked fine on current servers but failed on lots of servers out there using outdated technologies or libraries, so I had to go back and work it out.

But I love what I do and I wouldn’t have it any other way. And we have a great user community: their positive feedback, constructive comments and reviews, they motivate me to always give my best.

What is the “Mission statement” of Maps Marker Pro?

Maps Marker Pro is the most comprehensive & easy-to-use maps plugin for WordPress which helps you to share your favorite spots and tracks easily.

Our main goal is to provide you with an intuitive and user-friendly interface for organizing your spots within your WordPress powered site. We are constantly working on improving our plugin by adding new and innovative ways for managing and presenting your spots.

We love to talk to our users: You know best what you need, so we align our roadmap for new releases to your requirements. If you miss a feature or have some other feedback, please get in touch and we will check if it can be added with a future update.

To sum it up: we are working hard on delivering the best mapping plugin for WordPress, helping you to share your favorite spots and tracks.

What other projects are you working on?

I co-founded open3.at – an non-governmental network for the promotion of open data, open government and open society in Austria, and I am part of the offene-oeffis.at initiative, campaigning for open data in the Austrian public transport system.

But not all data should be open: Personal data should always be private and securely encrypted. That’s a concept I always follow in my own projects. To promote the importance of encryption, I approach other websites and providers and help them to fix their security issues.

And last but not least, I am always trying to keep up with net politics, because I think that issues like privacy, openness and transparency are key-factors in a democratic society.

Our team

The persons behind Maps Marker Pro

Robert Seyfriedsberger is the founder and CEO of Maps Marker Pro.

Globetrotting engineer Thorsten reinforces our ranks, drawing from his own experience as a user: Thorsten used Maps Marker Pro to document his coast-to-coast road trip through Canada on his travel blog.

Whenever there’s more to write than code, Sonja Fischbauer loves to help out. Sonja, who used to dig up ancient bones for her archaeology studies, puts the team’s work into words by copy-writing, editing and supporting PR & communications.

When his side project turned into a growing business, Robert joined up with a network of experts, like Waseem Senjer. Waseem is a professional WordPress plugin author, who – if not traveling the world and drinking up a good part of its coffee ressources – developed new features for Maps Marker Pro since version 2.4.

From time to time, the team is joined by freelancers, who help out with help desk work and support tickets, whenever we need reinforcement by tech-savvy eyes, fast typing hands and problem-solving heads.