Editing Categories and Location Import/Export

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

During the month of June we have been working on several patches for both Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform and WordPress plugin users. We have also performed multiple tweaks to improve performance including leveraging some PHP 8 specific performance tweaks.

SaaS User Editing Categories

All SaaS users received an updated earlier this week patching the category edit functionality. Buried deep in the new settings history tracker was an issue that prevented categories from being edited and saved after they were created. 

Since our SaaS platform still runs most of the core features through the old-school WordPress core code it inherits a lot of garbage including the very outdated category editor (we are hoping to replace that someday with a modern React style editor). Part of the garbage that is inherited with that 15-year-old janky interface is the fact that the only way to add extended attributes to categories, like our custom map markers and icons, is to store the extra metadata in the WordPress options table. It just so happens that is the MAIN settings storage area.

We missed that when adding our settings history feature to the SaaS plugin. Thus, any time a user saved their category updates for their locations the WordPress engine would fire the “hey, we just saved some settings” trigger. Our code was expecting actual settings not category data and didn’t handle it well.

That has been patched and is already deployed for all SaaS users.

Read more: Editing Categories and Location Import/Export

Location Import/Export

Users that have installed the Power add for WordPress may have issues importing and exporting locations. After a week of tracking down this issue, which only happens on SOME WordPress sites, we have found that the WordPress user settings for administrators can be corrupted. This causes the admin interface to not load properly. That causes the JavaScript for the Power add on (and likely lots of other plugins, not just ours) to not be loaded.

This is NOT corruption caused by our plugin code. We are not sure what triggers it, but in some case a WordPress install will start thinking it is a “multisite” install and attaches either the network_admin or user_admin attribute to a logged in user session. When that happens the “do this when an administrator is on the Store Locator Plus® admin pages” does not fire. 

What did we do to fix this? In our test installations where we could reproduce the problem we went to our administrator user profile , changed the website URL (you can change ANY data — might be a good time to update your passwords) and saved. After we re-saved our user profile with a new website URL or password everything came back as expected.

How did the user admin meta get out-of-whack? We may never know.

Bottom line, if you location imports or exports are broken try re-saving your user profile in WordPress.

This issue does NOT impact SaaS users.

Post image by Lance Cleveland

Store Category Management Improvements

Posted by lcleveland in MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus® was updated today with store category management improvements. Users reported an issue where the could not disassociate all store categories from a location. Assigning a store to a new category worked as expected, as did changing the category assigned to a location. The issue only appeared when trying to remove all category associates from a location.

Today’s updates resolves that issue and users can now disconnect all category references from a location.

store category management improvements
Store listing showing active categories.

Store Category Management

Store category management is a feature that is available to Professional or Enterprise level subscribers. It is enabled for WordPress plugin users with the Power add on.

Resolving The Issue

The issue impacts both SaaS platform and WordPress plugin users.

WordPress plugin users will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Power plugin to get the store category management improvements. Users with a SaaS subscription have been automatically updated to the improved experience.

post image via Pixabay

Editing Location Category – Patched

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software, MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Another day, another update — this time to fix assigning categories to locations.   For users of our Professional level service there was an interesting bug that would stop location category icons from showing up on the main list of locations in the admin panel.  It also had the affect of not checking of the proper assigned categories when editing a location; This made it look like a location was not assigned to any categories which was not always the case.

To make things more interesting, this bug only appeared if you turned off the Show Category Icons setting under Settings | Results. By default this setting is on, so most users did not notice the bug. For those that turn that setting off the category icons and names went away on the location list like the one below. It also meant the edit location form was not checking the matching categories.

Location category display on location listings.

This issue has been resolved.

For WordPress users , you will need to upgrade to the Power add on version 2301.11.X to see this bug fix. For our SaaS platform users, the update will go online this week — no further action is necessary.

post image courtesy of pixabay