SaaS 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 Platform Settings and Rank Issue v2502

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

The Store Locator Plus® SaaS platform was updated yesterday to bring it inline with current security and performance standards. The underlying MySQL database as well as the PHP engine on our SaaS servers were both beyond the actively supported stage and needed to be updated. Products deemed “end of life” and not actively supported do not receive security and performance updates. After reviewing the situation we made the decision to upgrade the technology stack and move to a more stable platform.

Overall the move has been a positive one that not only improves the security of our systems but has shown performance improvements on several metrics.

Unfortunately the changes to both PHP and MySQL forced multiple updates to the Store Locator Plus® codebase. Both PHP and MySQL introduced breaking changes in their major version updates that have happened over the past 7 years. That led to a year of code revisions and testing as we updated our code to work on actively supported PHP and MySQL versions that will give us another decade of updates to both components.

Some of these changes have impacted a few customers that were utilizing the ranking features to sort locations. One of our customers reported that their locator map was not displaying the initial set of locations for their services. The underlying issues and resolution are noted below.

Rank Field Conflict With MySQL 8

The main culprit here is the upgrade to MySQL 8. Servers were upgraded to MySQL 8 as the prior release was no longer supported. Amazon RDS services dropped support for the older MySQL version with standard support going offline i n February 2024. As such we were forced to upgrade MySQL; This change was a good thing overall but it involved notable data query and code updates.

Store Locator Plus® October Update Brings User Experience Updates

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

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.