During the month of June we have been working on several patches for both Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform and WordPress plugin users. We have also performed multiple tweaks to improve performance including leveraging some PHP 8 specific performance tweaks.
SaaS User Editing Categories
All SaaS users received an updated earlier this week patching the category edit functionality. Buried deep in the new settings history tracker was an issue that prevented categories from being edited and saved after they were created.
Since our SaaS platform still runs most of the core features through the old-school WordPress core code it inherits a lot of garbage including the very outdated category editor (we are hoping to replace that someday with a modern React style editor). Part of the garbage that is inherited with that 15-year-old janky interface is the fact that the only way to add extended attributes to categories, like our custom map markers and icons, is to store the extra metadata in the WordPress options table. It just so happens that is the MAIN settings storage area.
We missed that when adding our settings history feature to the SaaS plugin. Thus, any time a user saved their category updates for their locations the WordPress engine would fire the “hey, we just saved some settings” trigger. Our code was expecting actual settings not category data and didn’t handle it well.
That has been patched and is already deployed for all SaaS users.
Read more: Editing Categories and Location Import/Export
Location Import/Export
Users that have installed the Power add for WordPress may have issues importing and exporting locations. After a week of tracking down this issue, which only happens on SOME WordPress sites, we have found that the WordPress user settings for administrators can be corrupted. This causes the admin interface to not load properly. That causes the JavaScript for the Power add on (and likely lots of other plugins, not just ours) to not be loaded.
This is NOT corruption caused by our plugin code. We are not sure what triggers it, but in some case a WordPress install will start thinking it is a “multisite” install and attaches either the network_admin or user_admin attribute to a logged in user session. When that happens the “do this when an administrator is on the Store Locator Plus® admin pages” does not fire.
What did we do to fix this? In our test installations where we could reproduce the problem we went to our administrator user profile , changed the website URL (you can change ANY data — might be a good time to update your passwords) and saved. After we re-saved our user profile with a new website URL or password everything came back as expected.
How did the user admin meta get out-of-whack? We may never know.
Bottom line, if you location imports or exports are broken try re-saving your user profile in WordPress.
This issue does NOT impact SaaS users.
Post image by Lance Cleveland
