SaaS Archives | Store Locator Plus®

Hot Fix and Subscription Updates

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

Today’s update to Store Locator Plus® includes a hot fix and subscription update. The hot fix impacted some of the SaaS Professional and Enterprise users that are taking advantage of a couple of specific user interface modification settings. WordPress plugin users that have the Experience add on installed should update to the latest 2505.14.XX release.

Hot Fix Details

Users that were taking advantage of one of several user interface options that are available to Professional or Enterprise level accounts on the SaaS were receiving a fatal 500 level error when embedding the map. This was related to a patch in the 2505.08 release that addressed the User Interface module from the Experience add on from being loaded too early. A code autocomplete mechanism truncated a variable in a parameter passing routine that was causing a fatal missing parameter error in PHP. The fix was minor which allowed for rapid resolution and testing of the patch.

The fix impacted both the Experience WordPress plugin users as well as SaaS users. Impacted users of the SaaS were not seeing their locator map being rendered on page.

Generate Embed hot fix testing for a client for SaaS 2505.14

SaaS Subscription Updates

At the start of 2025 we launched a major update to the SaaS platform. That update included upgrades to several foundational elements of the SaaS platform, one of which was the Stripe payment processing library. The Stripe library upgrade is mostly backwards-compatible with the hundred of lines of PHP and JavaScript code included in the SaaS payment module, but it is not 100% compatible. While we addressed major functional changes before our January 2025 roll-out of the updated SaaS software, several elements still needed to be patched.

The SaaS update released today, 2505.14, patches several key features of the Stripe interface. Many of these patches only manifest in subtle ways — for example seeing details on subscription dates, next renewal date, and other details re-appear in the subscription section of “My Profile”.

The cancel subscription interface is back online; turns out Stripe also had a parameter passing issue in their upgraded API interface forcing us to modify a function call that was unchanged for a decade due to an undocumented change to the Stripe API.

Profile and Subscription Updates In Progress

Also included in this update is the start of our continued conversion to a React-centric interface that will rely far less on outdated WordPress-driven PHP user interfaces. The updated interfaces use new React MUI components. SaaS users will start other see this roll out in several areas over the remainder of 2025. The first update was the new “Style Manager” interface with the map preview which went online a couple of months ago. This update includes new a new “Site Info” component on the “My Profile” page — it works but is not fully styled yet as we decided it was better than the prior version that was on production and thus shipped with other components that passed testing and went along with the hot fix update.

We’re continuing to work on UI/UX and functional improvements for Store Locator Plus® and hope to continue regular rapid updates over the coming months that create an improved product and service experience for our client base.

If you have suggestions or feedback please contact us and share your thoughts.

Post Image by Dirk Hoenes from Pixabay

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.