Store Locator SaaS Articles | Store Locator Plus®

Location Search Report Update

Posted by lcleveland in Google Maps, Map Software, MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus

An issue impacting location search report was reported by several users after our SaaS platform update earlier this week. We were able to locate and resolve the underlying issue. A new version was released within 24 hours of the initial report and updated on our SaaS platform in version 2502.25.01 which went live earlier today.

Location search reports are available with the Professional and Enterprise level subscriptions.

Location Search Report Update for WordPress Plugin Users

Users of the legacy WordPress plugins, notably the Power plugin, will also be impacted by this issue and should update their Store Locator Plus® plugin stack. It should be noted that the main Store Locator Plus® plugin will no longer automatically update due to changes with our WordPress.org plugin listing. You will need to go to the WordPress plugin store and download an updated version there. If you do not have a WordPress plugin store account you will need to create one.

Users of the SaaS platform do not need to do anything, the search location report updates are automatically available and activated as part of your SaaS subscription.

Ignore Radius Update

In addition to the location search report update, users that have set the Radius Behavior to Do Not Use under the Search settings had an issue with results not being returned. This issue was also patched in the 2502.25.01 release that went to production on our SaaS platform earlier today.

Users of the Experience plugin will be impacted as well. The same instructions noted above apply to downloading the latest version of Store Locator Plus® from the plugin store. Users of the SaaS platform do not need to do anything; software updates are automatically available and activated as part of your SaaS subscription.

Post Image by Lance Cleveland from Pixabay

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.