Store Locator Plus® 5.9 Security Update Released (WordPress Plugin)

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus® 5.9 was released today for our WordPress plugin customers. The update addresses several security concerns in the AJAX and REST libraries included with Store Locator Plus®. Despite several articles being released prematurely from security companies in the WordPress market, we are unaware of any compromises to WordPress sites due to this vulnerability.

Unfortunately the folks that manage the WordPress plugin directory de-listed Store Locator Plus® almost immediately, despite our ongoing communication that we were working on patching the reported vulnerabilities. As such, many of our WordPress plugin users are now unable to update the WordPress plugin to install the latest 5.9 release automatically from within their site dashboard.

Upgrading Store Locator Plus® On WordPress

Users that wish to upgrade to the latest 5.9 release will need to follow these steps until further notice:

If you do not already have an account at WordPress.StoreLocatorPlus.com with the Store Locator Plus® base plugin as a prior purchase, you will need to purchase it.
1. Go to https://wordpress.storelocatorplus.com/
2. Click the Add To Cart Link
3. Complete your purchase
Login to your WordPress.StoreLocatorPlus.com account and download the base plugin.
1. Go to https://wordpress.storelocatorplus.com/
2. Click on My Account (top right of screen on the menu bar)
3. Click on the Downloads entry on the account menu (top-middle of the page).
4. Download Store Locator Plus®
Deactivate and Delete Store Locator Plus® from your website plugins. It will not remove your settings or locations.
1. Login to your website as a site administrator.
2. Go to plugins.
3. Find the Store Locator Plus® plugin, hover over the entry on the plugin list.
4. Deactivate the Store Locator Plus® plugin (this may deactivate your premium Store Locator Plus® add ons)
5. Delete the Store Locator Plus® plugin.
Upload and activate the updated 5.9 version of Store Locator Plus®.
1. While staying logged in as an administrator on your site go to plugins.
2. Click the Add New button.
3. Click the Upload Plugin button next to the “Add Plugins” title.
4. Select the Store Locator Plus® slp4.zip file you downloaded from our WordPress store.
5. Go back to the main Plugins dashboard on your site, listing all plugins.
6. Check off ALL the Store Locator Plus® plugins, including the newly-uploaded Store Locator Plus® base plugin and any premium add-ons you may have.
7. From the menu on the top or bottom of the plugin list, choose “Activate” and click Apply.

For those that do not have an existing purchase of the Store Locator Plus® base plugin for WordPress and do NOT wish to purchase a copy from our store, you can wait until the folks that manage the WordPress plugin directory review our latest release and re-list it in the WordPress plugin store. We are hoping this happens soon, but they are very busy and it could take up to a month for them to review our updates.

For Our SaaS Customers

For our customers using our SaaS service, none of this applies to you. All security patches and updates are automatically provided as part of the service. The security concerns in the self-managed WordPress plugin that are being discussed do not affect your site in any way. SaaS users are not hosting data or access endpoints for AJAX or REST on their servers, and thus have no vulnerabilities like those discussed in the various Store Locator Plus® security bulletins.

Store Locator Plus® Updates On The Way

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus

Store Locator Plus® recently hired a new developer to help work on both front end and back end code. It is part of a renewed focus on providing routine monthly updates to the Store Locator Plus® platform. Changes will roll out slowly at first, with a focus on the WordPress plugins as our new development team learns the ins-and-outs of the platform. Our end goal is to vastly improve the platform with several key objectives in sight — to improve overall security, to improve the performance, and most importantly to improve the user experience.

Store Locator Plus® 5.7 was recently released to the WordPress community with several key security updates. These updates will help ensure proper data security and integrity on sites that run the standalone WordPress plugin offering. The security updates are automatically being included in the SaaS platform and require no action on the part of our SaaS platform users.

We are working on version 5.8 for both the WordPress plugins and the SaaS platform, which will include further security updates as well as some JavaScript performance updates as we start to employ new coding standards in the JavaScript engine.

Once we get the foundation solid, we will start working on the User Experience and feature requests. If there is something you’d like to see in our SaaS offering, please let us know in the forums or by reaching out to us via the email form.

Location Category Markers Update

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus

Store Locator Plus® was updated with a small, but important, change to how location map markers are displayed when users are interacting with the category selector. Users of the Professional level offering have the ability to create location categories. Locations can belong to more than one category, for instance a location can be both a “Retail” location and a “Service” location. Some locations will be only “Retail”.

Category Map Markers

Each location category can also be assigned a unique map marker. All yellow map markers are retail, and blue markers are for service. For those locations where they offer both retail and service , Store Locator Plus® would always display the yellow map marker based on the default “marker is the first category, chosen by alphabetical order”.

While there are some caveats to this general rule, there were some confusing results. If you created a map with a category filter that allowed users to pick “either retail” or “service” locations and the user selected “service” they could see a map with both yellow and blue markers. How is that happening when all service locations are supposed to be showing blue markers?

The answer — those dual-purpose locations that are in both the retail and service category. Prior to the late-September update, the marker for the location would ALWAYS pick from the “highest ranked” category which would default to “retail” by the alphabetical rule noted above. All locations that were service only would be displayed alongside a handful or retail-and-service locations.

Multiple Categories Marker Change

In the late-September update that went online today, IF a user is filtering the list of locations by a SINGLE category, the map marker that is displayed will be filtered as well — in essence filtering out the yellow “retail” marker if the user has elected “show only service location” with the blue marker. With this update only blue markers will appear.

For another description of how this works along with an “explainer” video, check out our Categorical Location Markers article on the documentation site.

Still using the legacy WordPress plugins? This feature is part of the Power 5.5.7 release.