Starting 2023 with a renewed push on Store Locator Plus® updates, starting with patching some minor warnings and bugs reported by users. One of the updates is a preemptive patch for Cluster Map Markers. Multiple updates are anticipated over the coming weeks. If you have a feature request or bug to report please let us know via the Contact Form. This week there are two minor updates coming your way.
Style Gallery
The Store Locator Plus® Style Gallery went offline as a special 2022 year-end present. Turns out a server upgrade also turned on a setting that makes directories case sensitive with PHP 8 enabled. We’re still looking for the setting, but in the meantime we renamed a ./x/REST directory to ./x/rest in our style gallery service and updated our code to find either version. The Store Locator Plus® UX Style Gallery is back online for all users.
This issue affected both our SaaS users and WordPress plugins users, however no action is needed on your part as it was a style services issue on our end.
Cluster Map Marker Preemptive Update
For Enterprise users that are taking advantage of the cluster map markers, a patch is coming to eliminate a warning of a deprecated Google Maps library method. The cluster markers still function correctly, but they may not on future Google Map library updates. We are patching this before it becomes a problem for our SaaS or WordPress plugin users.
For WP plugin users the patch is in the Premier add-on.
Power Add On PHP8 Compatibility
This issue only impacts WordPress users running the self-managed plugin on a server running PHP 8. While WordPress itself has yet to officially support PHP 8 (it is still in “beta support”), many cloud hosted WordPress sites are automatically being updated to PHP 8. If your hosting provider automatically updates your underlying PHP engine to version 8+, the Power add on can break your site with a parameter positioning warning. The 2301.10 update to Power will address that issue.
Users of the Store Locator Plus® Software as a Service are not impacted.
How To Update
Our Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform users will receive the updates in the next few days after testing is complete. Nothing needs to be done to get the latest patches. WordPress plugin users will need to update the self-managed plugins accordingly.
Coming Soon
We will be working on more Store Locator Plus® patches this month. On the short list are additional patches to the WordPress plugins and SaaS platform to address some issues that customers have reported.
An update for our Professional and Enterprise plan SaaS users as well as Power add on users for WordPress is coming soon to address category management for locations.
We also have some style updates on the radar as well as a notable overhaul to the category admin interface. Keep an eye on our news feed in the coming weeks for more updates.