Today’s update to Store Locator Plus® includes a hot fix and subscription update. The hot fix impacted some of the SaaS Professional and Enterprise users that are taking advantage of a couple of specific user interface modification settings. WordPress plugin users that have the Experience add on installed should update to the latest 2505.14.XX release.
Users that were taking advantage of one of several user interface options that are available to Professional or Enterprise level accounts on the SaaS were receiving a fatal 500 level error when embedding the map. This was related to a patch in the 2505.08 release that addressed the User Interface module from the Experience add on from being loaded too early. A code autocomplete mechanism truncated a variable in a parameter passing routine that was causing a fatal missing parameter error in PHP. The fix was minor which allowed for rapid resolution and testing of the patch.
The fix impacted both the Experience WordPress plugin users as well as SaaS users. Impacted users of the SaaS were not seeing their locator map being rendered on page.
Generate Embed hot fix testing for a client for SaaS 2505.14
SaaS Subscription Updates
At the start of 2025 we launched a major update to the SaaS platform. That update included upgrades to several foundational elements of the SaaS platform, one of which was the Stripe payment processing library. The Stripe library upgrade is mostly backwards-compatible with the hundred of lines of PHP and JavaScript code included in the SaaS payment module, but it is not 100% compatible. While we addressed major functional changes before our January 2025 roll-out of the updated SaaS software, several elements still needed to be patched.
The SaaS update released today, 2505.14, patches several key features of the Stripe interface. Many of these patches only manifest in subtle ways — for example seeing details on subscription dates, next renewal date, and other details re-appear in the subscription section of “My Profile”.
The cancel subscription interface is back online; turns out Stripe also had a parameter passing issue in their upgraded API interface forcing us to modify a function call that was unchanged for a decade due to an undocumented change to the Stripe API.
Profile and Subscription Updates In Progress
Also included in this update is the start of our continued conversion to a React-centric interface that will rely far less on outdated WordPress-driven PHP user interfaces. The updated interfaces use new React MUI components. SaaS users will start other see this roll out in several areas over the remainder of 2025. The first update was the new “Style Manager” interface with the map preview which went online a couple of months ago. This update includes new a new “Site Info” component on the “My Profile” page — it works but is not fully styled yet as we decided it was better than the prior version that was on production and thus shipped with other components that passed testing and went along with the hot fix update.
We’re continuing to work on UI/UX and functional improvements for Store Locator Plus® and hope to continue regular rapid updates over the coming months that create an improved product and service experience for our client base.
If you have suggestions or feedback please contact us and share your thoughts.
The Store Locator Plus® SaaS and WordPress plugins have been updated to lay the foundation for rapid updates over the next few months. Before we could begin our “quick sprint” series of updates to patch minor bugs and release smaller feature updates at a faster pace we needed to fix the “foundation” of Store Locator Plus®.
Some of the updates in this release include the stability of retaining locator settings, a new settings history feature for our SaaS clients, the removal of the “quick save” feature, and addressing a half dozen PHP warnings or errors for our WordPress plugin users.
The updates to the WordPress core engine since the 6.X release changed the order in which various pieces of the Store Locator Plus® code was running. Some of the changes were related to how WordPress language management worked via their load text domain calls. This functionality is related to the multilingual, or polyglot, capabilities in WordPress — and thus also the Store Locator Plus® system. Since WordPress 6, multiple warnings were being generated as a previously undocumented “feature” of WordPress would force the text translation code to be called earlier than instructed. This automatically-triggered, and unexpected, loading of the text translation module meant that Store Locator Plus® code was bringing various settings modules “online” earlier than anticipated.
This had the effect of prematurely loading various settings modules and triggered a series of “what is this setting? — ok, let’s set it to a default value” events in our code. That led to a string of complex inter-related events that appeared to our users as “hey, whenever the main Store Locator Plus® plugin is updated to a new major version some of our settings get reset”. This issue has been resolved.
But My Settings Didn’t Always Reset…
That is what made tracking down this issue so difficult. The problem was not easy to reproduce. We spent much of the past two months tracking down specific settings that were being reset to their default value, fixing bugs or timing issues with those settings only to find out other settings would then be reset.
It turns out that a very specific string of events has to occur, and it does not impact all users every time. The main trigger is the core of the code, the Store Locator Plus® base plugin had to be upgraded to a new version. In addition users of the SaaS had to be a Professional or Enterprise level user — or WordPress plugin users had to have Power, Experience, or Premier installed and active. In addition, at least one setting from those advanced features had to be changed from their default at some point in the past.
Settings that contained text values, such as labels, were especially vulnerable to being reset.
Settings Issue Resolved
After extensive testing during the past couple of weeks of the 2505.08 version of our SaaS platform as well as the standalone WordPress plugins, we believe this issue has been resolved. The resolution involved splitting apart several functions that setup the Store Locator Plus® environment and having those new functions connect to different points in the WordPress platform startup sequence.
These updates have stabilized the settings issues and should prevent these seemingly random resets from happening for both our plugin and our SaaS users during future platform updates.
Settings History
A new feature we are developing for the SaaS platform has been started as part of our settings reset research and investigation. A new menu entry “Settings History” is now available to all users. With the 2505.08 release on the SaaS platform, this is a simple read-only report of what settings have been changed and when. This is intended to provide a way to see what settings may have been changed, whether automatically triggered or specifically set by the administrator for your account. If your locator interface is not looking or behaving as you expect, this should provide a way to see what was changed so you can put it back to the prior settings.
Setting history noting a change we made from having the map centered in United States to Charleston SC
In the future this will evolve to provide an interface option to restore specific settings or even rewind your settings back to a specific point in time. This interface will also provide the foundation to allow for your account to store and save multiple setting configurations that can be deployed on your site with different embed codes. That makes it possible to have one set of locations that can drive several very different presentations of the location map and listings for directories. For example, you can have a settings group named “The Southeast” and another named “New England” each with a corresponding “center map at” location as well as a different default radius for each. Running a global company and want to use km for locations in Europe to miles for locations in the US? In the future you’ll be able to generate a different embed code for each using the “render map with the Europe settings” version for one and the “render with US settings” for another.
“Quick Save” Removed
The “quick save” settings feature has been removed. In the past some settings that had a dark red label would “quick save”, a feature popular six-plus years ago that would automatically implement a setting as soon as you changed it on the user interface — no need to press the save button on the settings page. This feature is now gone as it was not implemented across all settings, thus making for a confusing “click save for these settings, but not these” user experience. Now nothing is saved or updated after you change a setting unless you intentionally click the Save button on the settings page.
Other PHP Specific Updates
The following updates primarily impact our WordPress plugin users that are running different versions of PHP, MySQL and other baseline technologies for their installations. Our SaaS platform is built on stable standardized versions of PHP and MySQL in addition to having the PHP configuration files on the platform tailored to meet the latest best practices for that platform. Non-standard PHP configurations, outdated versions of PHP, or bleeding edge releases of PHP can cause a number of issues that manifest in error messages appearing on a website when installing Store Locator Plus®. Some of those messages can cause a fatal error, shutting down an entire site due to how PHP and WordPress handle the severity of different errors.
Errors that appear for PHP 8.X releases that were brought to our attention have been resolved including:
Store Locator Plus® has two settings related to how many locations are returned when displaying a map. The first setting “Number To Show Initially” is the setting that determines how many locations will be shown when the map first renders. The locations are typically the first n-locations that are closest to the center point of the map unless other setting are adjusted to do something different. The second is the “Number To Show” after a search. This is the maximum number of locations that will be returned when a user enters and address and searches for locations.
Somewhere along the way the location search results settings got muddled and often the number of locations to be shown after a search was ignored. Instead the “Number To Show Initially” was used for both settings. We are not sure exactly when the behavior changed, likely during a huge thousand-lines-of-code update forced upon us by the folks at the WordPress Plugin Directory in the name of “security patches” (don’t even get me started on that topic). Regardless, an attentive user reported the problem along with the steps to reproduce the errant behavior. We were able to issue a patch for that issue and roll it into our March 2025 update on the SaaS platform (plugin users are also impacted).
