lcleveland, Author at Store Locator Plus®

Location Rank and General Updates

Posted by lcleveland in MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator Plus

The Store Locator Plus® platform was updated this morning with several updates addressing user-reported issues. One of the primary issues that was resolved within 24 hours of being reported was locations not appearing for customers that were utilizing the location ranking system. The location rank allows users to show locations by their rank first, then by another parameter such as distance second.

The location rank feature, available for Professional and Enterprise users, provides a way to give priority for some locations over others. Unlike the featured option, which give equal weighting to all locations marked featured, the rank option provides more granularity. Higher ranked locations appear at the top of the list of locations that is returned, in order by their rank.

As noted in the SaaS Platform Settings and Rank Issues v2502 post, the issue locations not appearing was due to a breaking change presented by the upgrade to MySQL version 8.

Saas Platform Settings and Rank Issue v2502

Posted by lcleveland in MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus

The Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform was updated yesterday to bring it inline with current security and performance standards. The underlying MySQL database as well as the PHP engine on our SaaS servers were both beyond the actively supported stage and needed to be updated. Products deemed “end of life” and not actively supported do not receive security and performance updates. After reviewing the situation we made the decision to upgrade the technology stack and move to a more stable platform.

Overall the move has been a positive one that not only improves the security of our systems but has shown performance improvements on several metrics.

Unfortunately the changes to both PHP and MySQL forced multiple updates to the Store Locator Plus® codebase. Both PHP and MySQL introduced breaking changes in their major version updates that have happened over the past 7 years. That led to a year of code revisions and testing as we updated our code to work on actively supported PHP and MySQL versions that will give us another decade of updates to both components.

Some of these changes have impacted a few customers that were utilizing the ranking features to sort locations. One of our customers reported that their locator map was not displaying the initial set of locations for their services. The underlying issues and resolution are noted below.

Rank Field Conflict With MySQL 8

The main culprit here is the upgrade to MySQL 8. Servers were upgraded to MySQL 8 as the prior release was no longer supported. Amazon RDS services dropped support for the older MySQL version with standard support going offline i n February 2024. As such we were forced to upgrade MySQL; This change was a good thing overall but it involved notable data query and code updates.

Store Locator Plus® Update Coming This Weekend

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software

The Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform will be updated this weekend after months of restructuring servers and software. The new version will be running the latest versions of PHP and MySQL on top of cloud based container services. These updates are expected to improve overall stability and performance of the SaaS platform.

Most changes will not be readily apparent to most users outside of some basic user interface updates including menu restructuring and the new locator style interface. Once the new servers and software take over for our production SaaS login it will provide the ability for our team to provide release more frequently and in smaller packages. We are hoping this leads to faster response times addressing customer issues and the ability for our team to launch new features, big or small, on a faster release schedule.

You can learn more about what changes are coming that will impact the user experience in our New Locator Updates Coming Soon post.

Expected Downtime

During this transition we anticipate the main SaaS website to be unavailable for users to login for up to 30 minutes on Sunday February 23rd, 2025 starting around noon EST. Map rendering on customer sites should see little to no impact during this update.

The update is expected to be finished and the new system to be fully online for users by 4PM EST the same day.

If you have issues logging in or notice problems with your locator installation after 4PM EST on February 23rd 2025 please contact us using the contact form within the dashboard page or via the contact form here.

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Post Image by Lars Nissen from Pixabay