The October 2022 update of Store Locator Plus® is now out for both the SaaS platform and the self-managed installations for WordPress plugins. The current release continues down the path of updating the user controls dashboard with newer React-based components. While the user experience (UX) updates are relatively minor with this October update, the underlying technology has set the foundation to begin replacing major interface elements with a modern interface.
The new Material UI on React design will allow Store Locator Plus® to catch up to modern design standards and pave the way for not only a better interface on the dashboard but lead to more advanced designs on the published location maps and eventually produce advanced directory style listings from your locations.
Some of the changes you’ll notice in this release include a new title bar, simplified menu system, and context-sensitive documentation links on each primary Store Locator Plus® dashboard page.
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.
SLP Has Been Re-Listed
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.
It has been a while since we’ve had updates for the Store Locator Plus® plugin and SaaS service. We’ve been busy over the past year adding new development staff and getting them up-to-speed in order to address new demands presented by the WordPress Plugin Team in order to get Store Locator Plus® re-listed in the plugin directory. Their demands to shore up potential weaknesses in the main plugin turned out to be a major project.
Over the past 8 months the development team has updated nearly 1,000 lines of code in the base plugin. It is important to note that these changes did NOT fix known security breaches or exploits; The changes were done primarily to address hypothetical what-if security concerns in the plugin. While the updates do little to improve security of the plugin and have a minor negative impact on performance, the changes were necessary in order to meet the new WordPress Plugin Team guidelines for getting our plugin re-listed.
Finally, after 8 months of effort we are nearing the finish line. We are now testing an updated 5.13.X prerelease version of the Store Locator Plus® plugin. Once we have finished our own internal testing and all base functionality has been approved, we will re-submit the plugin for re-listing on the WordPress directory.
While this is a milestone that has been in the works for a long time, it is only the first step in many new changes that are planned for the coming year. Our lead architect, along with the rest of the development team, have a lot of great new ideas to improve our product. The 10-year-old technology is ready for an overhaul using modern standards. A vastly improved user experience is in the works as well as a much improved turn-key experience with a tighter WordPress Plugin integration with our SaaS platform.
We are excited to get past this year-long maintenance and security cycle and start building new things for our customers.
In the meantime, if anyone is interested in helping us test the prerelease version of Store Locator Plus® 5.13, please reach out via the contact form and we’ll send you an early release at no charge. Our Premier Subscription holders can already download the prerelease from their account downloads page.
We appreciate your patience while we get things rebooted on the WordPress directory. We look forward to providing improved user experiences and application performance in the coming months.
