Editing Location Category – Patched

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

SaaS Database Servers Upgraded for 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.