Protecting Google API Keys

protecting google api keys

For those of you in the self-service Store Locator Plus® WordPress plugins camp you are going to want to spend time protecting your Google API Keys.    For those using our Store Locator Plus® managed SaaS service, this is yet another article you can skip.

The basic configuration of Google API Keys tells you to turn off ALL restrictions on the first API key you setup with Google.    Turns out a lot of people have issues with configuring the keys properly and getting them put in the right place. 

To make matters more complicated, some lower-end web hosting companies don’t understand security and in turn shut off critical web services that do nothing to improve security; Like disabling all communication between the web server and Google.  That breaks things like the ability to Geocode locations in Store Locator Plus®.

This article is here to tell our WordPress plugin users how to properly secure their Google API keys for web hosts are configured properly.

Location Directions for Store Locator

The list of locations has a link for directions from your user’s location to each of the stores shown on the map.    At some point in the recent past this feature stopped working.    Our November update to My Store Locator Plus® addresses this issue, restoring proper direction links to your locations.    Self-managed WordPress plugin users will need to upgrade to the Store Locator Plus plugin version 4.9.22 for this patch.

Map Directions
Map Directions

 

Hyperlink Phone Dialer

The dial by phone feature stopped working in a recent update to Store Locator Plus®.   This impacted both the self-managed WordPress plugins as well as our fully managed My Store Locator Plus® service users.

The patch is available in the Experience add on version 4.9.22 for WordPress users; WordPress plugin users will need to download and install the latest release.   MySLP users already have the updated software and will have the dialing feature back online by the time they read this.

Dial By Phone is a feature that wraps the phone number links in the location lists in a link with a de-facto standard tel: prefix.    For users visiting your site from a mobile phone the on-phone browser will automatically dial the number when a user clicks the link.