News | Page 6 of 35 | Store Locator Plus®

SaaS Database Servers Upgraded for Store Locator Plus®

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus

Preparations are underway to bring multiple upgrades to the Store Locator Plus® location map and directory services over the next few months. Part of those preparations include upgrading the underlying architecture that runs our services. One of the key elements behind our WordPress plugin store, the documentation site, our demo site, and others is the database engine.

Tonight we implemented a database upgrade that improves the security and performance of all Store Locator Plus® services. This upgrade was required by AWS for all MySQL compatible database installations. The end-of-life (EOL) was set for February 2023 which was far too close to the “busy season” for many of our Store Locator Plus® SaaS users.

With that in mind we opted to perform the upgrade on August 1st. This week is typically the slowest traffic week of the entire year, just before thing start to ramp up again for the busy fall and pre-Christmas season. After a week of testing and analysis, tonight was the night to make it happen. WIth full backups in place and the failover/recovery nodes on the cluster working as expected, the decision was made to put the latest version of the database engine online.

While a few customers experienced up to 5 minutes of downtime this evening, most customers saw zero downtime as the new version of the database came online and the prior servers were retired.

This is one of many steps we are taking to continue to improve the performance and security of our servers. For our SaaS platform users it is one more thing we are doing to ensure your map, directory, and location search services remain fast and reliable for years to come.

Over the course of the next month we will continue to improve our infrastructure while the development team works on an improved user experience and additional features for all Store Locator Plus® users.

Thank you for being a Store Locator Plus® customer.

Power v5.13 Addresses Location Categorization Issue

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Version 5.13 of the Store Locator Plus® Power add on for WordPress plugins was released today. The update is a minor one as we continue to clean up the WordPress plugin family. Multiple updates are expected in the next few weeks in preparation for better SaaS integration , user experience improvements, and general feature improvements.

In Power v5.13

Add new location category was logging a warning about an undefined or null variable reference. This has been resolved.

Power – On The Radar

For the WordPress plugins we are aware of an issue related to the SEO pages functionality and an array offset warning that comes up when creating an SEO page. This is on the R&D schedule to be addressed in an upcoming release. Current estimate is to have an update ready in less than 30 days.

Store Locator Plus® SaaS Impact

The issues resolved in Power 5.13 do not affect functionality or performance of the MySLP SaaS platform. As such the updates included here will be published in combination with other updates in a future upgrade to the MySLP platform.

Store Locator Plus® Has Been Re-listed

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

It has been a year since Store Locator Plus® has been listed in the official WordPress plugin directory. The previous 12 months have been quite the journey to get the plugin re-listed — but we finally made it! Kudos to the development team for taking on the thousands of lines of code that make the Store Locator Plus® applications “go” and helping us get there. Thanks to the customer support team for helping keep things going while the dev team was getting up to speed and addressing all the concerns noted by the folks on the WordPress Plugin Team. It took longer than expected, but we finally have our plugin and the associated one-click updates for our install base back online.

Store Locator Plus® 5.13.8 for WordPress

The new release, Store Locator Plus® 5.13.8 is available for immediate download from your WordPress SLP account. Now that we have been re-listed you can also get our plugin directly from the WordPress plugin directory.

This update includes PHP 8 compatibility (use with caution, PHP 8 is still not officially supported by WordPress) as well as numerous internal security updates. It also patches some minor issues reported in the past year.

There are a LOT of code changes and millions of combinations of settings in Store Locator Plus®. We’ve tested compatibility with the premium add ons from Power, Experience, and Premier but your configuration may uncover an issue we did not discover. If you run into issues with the latests update please let us know and we’ll address the problem as quickly as we can.

We’re Back

Our business leader and original architect of Store Locator Plus® is back at it full time. Our tech leader has been very busy during the past two years, assisting Store Locator Plus® on a limited basis while working to get another tech startup off-the-ground. That company is now moving to the next phase and our leader is back and is 100% focused on bring the next generation of Store Locator Plus products and services to market.

Plans are in the works to improve the user experience, improve stability and performance, and branch out to natively support more web presence platforms and web developer tool kits. New features and services are coming to the SaaS platform, with a renewed focus on extending the reach of our software-as-a-service offering. Pricing changes are being discussed to ease the burden on small businesses.

There is a lot more coming. Be sure to subscribe to our news feed to keep up as we work toward the next generation of products and services.

Focusing On You

One of the first changes being employed is focusing on how we can help YOU, our established customer base. We have a lot of catching up to do and are committed to getting Store Locator Plus® back to the top of the locator software and services list. To get there we are going to need your help.

The best way to help? Communicating your needs. What can we do better? What features are missing or can be improved? Or drop us a note to tell us what we’re doing right.

We promise we’ll listen and do our best to improve our services and products.