maps Archives | Store Locator Plus®

Location Rank and General Updates

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

The Store Locator Plus® platform was updated this morning with several updates addressing user-reported issues. One of the primary issues that was resolved within 24 hours of being reported was locations not appearing for customers that were utilizing the location ranking system. The location rank allows users to show locations by their rank first, then by another parameter such as distance second.

The location rank feature, available for Professional and Enterprise users, provides a way to give priority for some locations over others. Unlike the featured option, which give equal weighting to all locations marked featured, the rank option provides more granularity. Higher ranked locations appear at the top of the list of locations that is returned, in order by their rank.

As noted in the SaaS Platform Settings and Rank Issues v2502 post, the issue locations not appearing was due to a breaking change presented by the upgrade to MySQL version 8.

SaaS Database Servers Upgraded for Store Locator Plus®

Posted by lcleveland in 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.

URL Location Selector Patch and WordPress Listing Update

Posted by lcleveland in Google Maps, Map Software, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus® was updated today with a patch that ensures the location selection via URL remains functional. The location selection via URL allows you to build links on your site that load up a page that hosts the Store Locator Plus® map and auto-select a specific location. Changes in the JavaScript standard impacted the way this feature works, causing inconsistent behavior in different browser. The patch that was put online today for our SaaS users eliminates the inconsistency and re-enables this feature for all browsers.

Users of our self-managed WordPress plugins will need to download the latest Store Locator Plus® release from our website. Normally this would be available directly from the WordPress plugin directory, however the WordPress plugin team has yet to approve our latest updates. Until they approve the updates and re-enable free downloads, the only option for WordPress plugin users to get the latest release is to purchase the base plugin from our WordPress store.

Tired of waiting for the WordPress plugin team to re-activate the plugin and provide quick-and-easy automated updates? Switch over to the Store Locator Plus® SaaS release and you never have to deal with updating your locator plugin stack again. We handle all those details for you. Prices start as low as $5/month.