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 in 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.

MySQL added the word “rank” as a reserved word. This conflicts with our Professional an Enterprise feature that has used rank as a standard field name for a decade. Turns out we missed on location where we need to specifically mark this field in the data query.

Any sites that have, or had, a location with the rank field set may experience an issue with initial location results not appearing. 

Resolved in the 2502.24.01 update to the Experience module.
Testing underway 25/02/24 13:00 EST.
Deployment to production expected by 5PM EST February 24th 2025.

Settings Reset Issue

Even after months of testing on several platforms, we have learned that some users are experiencing issues on the SaaS platform where some settings are being reset. We are actively working on resolving the issue as well as providing a user-initiated feature to restore settings. As soon as we have resolved the issue we will post an update on this news feed.

We do not have an estimate as to how long it will take to provide a resolution.

In the meantime we will continue to update this post with a list of setting we know to have been impacted for some users.

Impacted Settings

updated: Feb 24 2025 11:12A EST

Users may need to review and reset the following settings:

  • initial_radius (Results: Initial Search Radius)
    • now: empty
  • initial_results_returned (Results: Number To Show Initially)
    • now: 25
  • map_home_icon (Map: Home Marker)
    • now: https://dashboard.storelocatorplus.com/*/wp-content/mu-plugins/store-locator-plus/images/icons/bulb_yellow.png
  • map_end_icon (Map: Location Marker)
    • now: https://dashboard.storelocatorplus.com/*/wp-content/mu-plugins/store-locator-plus/images/icons/bulb_azure.png
  • zoom_level (Map: Zoom Level)
    • now: 12

Be advised that there may be other settings impacted in addition to those on the list.

We are working on locating the root cause of the issue as well as a way to restore previous settings once we address the root cause of the issue.

Post Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay