The Store Locator Plus® SaaS and WordPress plugins have been updated to lay the foundation for rapid updates over the next few months. Before we could begin our “quick sprint” series of updates to patch minor bugs and release smaller feature updates at a faster pace we needed to fix the “foundation” of Store Locator Plus®.
Some of the updates in this release include the stability of retaining locator settings, a new settings history feature for our SaaS clients, the removal of the “quick save” feature, and addressing a half dozen PHP warnings or errors for our WordPress plugin users.
Read more: Locator Updates for Spring 2025Locator Settings Stability
The updates to the WordPress core engine since the 6.X release changed the order in which various pieces of the Store Locator Plus® code was running. Some of the changes were related to how WordPress language management worked via their load text domain calls. This functionality is related to the multilingual, or polyglot, capabilities in WordPress — and thus also the Store Locator Plus® system. Since WordPress 6, multiple warnings were being generated as a previously undocumented “feature” of WordPress would force the text translation code to be called earlier than instructed. This automatically-triggered, and unexpected, loading of the text translation module meant that Store Locator Plus® code was bringing various settings modules “online” earlier than anticipated.
This had the effect of prematurely loading various settings modules and triggered a series of “what is this setting? — ok, let’s set it to a default value” events in our code. That led to a string of complex inter-related events that appeared to our users as “hey, whenever the main Store Locator Plus® plugin is updated to a new major version some of our settings get reset”. This issue has been resolved.
But My Settings Didn’t Always Reset…
That is what made tracking down this issue so difficult. The problem was not easy to reproduce. We spent much of the past two months tracking down specific settings that were being reset to their default value, fixing bugs or timing issues with those settings only to find out other settings would then be reset.
It turns out that a very specific string of events has to occur, and it does not impact all users every time. The main trigger is the core of the code, the Store Locator Plus® base plugin had to be upgraded to a new version. In addition users of the SaaS had to be a Professional or Enterprise level user — or WordPress plugin users had to have Power, Experience, or Premier installed and active. In addition, at least one setting from those advanced features had to be changed from their default at some point in the past.
Settings that contained text values, such as labels, were especially vulnerable to being reset.
Settings Issue Resolved
After extensive testing during the past couple of weeks of the 2505.08 version of our SaaS platform as well as the standalone WordPress plugins, we believe this issue has been resolved. The resolution involved splitting apart several functions that setup the Store Locator Plus® environment and having those new functions connect to different points in the WordPress platform startup sequence.
These updates have stabilized the settings issues and should prevent these seemingly random resets from happening for both our plugin and our SaaS users during future platform updates.
Settings History
A new feature we are developing for the SaaS platform has been started as part of our settings reset research and investigation. A new menu entry “Settings History” is now available to all users. With the 2505.08 release on the SaaS platform, this is a simple read-only report of what settings have been changed and when. This is intended to provide a way to see what settings may have been changed, whether automatically triggered or specifically set by the administrator for your account. If your locator interface is not looking or behaving as you expect, this should provide a way to see what was changed so you can put it back to the prior settings.
In the future this will evolve to provide an interface option to restore specific settings or even rewind your settings back to a specific point in time. This interface will also provide the foundation to allow for your account to store and save multiple setting configurations that can be deployed on your site with different embed codes. That makes it possible to have one set of locations that can drive several very different presentations of the location map and listings for directories. For example, you can have a settings group named “The Southeast” and another named “New England” each with a corresponding “center map at” location as well as a different default radius for each. Running a global company and want to use km for locations in Europe to miles for locations in the US? In the future you’ll be able to generate a different embed code for each using the “render map with the Europe settings” version for one and the “render with US settings” for another.
“Quick Save” Removed
The “quick save” settings feature has been removed. In the past some settings that had a dark red label would “quick save”, a feature popular six-plus years ago that would automatically implement a setting as soon as you changed it on the user interface — no need to press the save button on the settings page. This feature is now gone as it was not implemented across all settings, thus making for a confusing “click save for these settings, but not these” user experience. Now nothing is saved or updated after you change a setting unless you intentionally click the Save button on the settings page.
Other PHP Specific Updates
The following updates primarily impact our WordPress plugin users that are running different versions of PHP, MySQL and other baseline technologies for their installations. Our SaaS platform is built on stable standardized versions of PHP and MySQL in addition to having the PHP configuration files on the platform tailored to meet the latest best practices for that platform. Non-standard PHP configurations, outdated versions of PHP, or bleeding edge releases of PHP can cause a number of issues that manifest in error messages appearing on a website when installing Store Locator Plus®. Some of those messages can cause a fatal error, shutting down an entire site due to how PHP and WordPress handle the severity of different errors.
Errors that appear for PHP 8.X releases that were brought to our attention have been resolved including:
- Call to update_wp_option() on null
- _load_textdomain_just_in_time() warnings
- DSRA null reference error
Post Image by Lance Cleveland from Pixabay