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.

Store Locator Plus® Updates On The Way

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus

Store Locator Plus® recently hired a new developer to help work on both front end and back end code.  It is part of a renewed focus on providing routine monthly updates to the Store Locator Plus® platform.    Changes will roll out slowly at first, with a focus on the WordPress plugins as our new development team learns the ins-and-outs of the platform.   Our end goal is to vastly improve the platform with several key objectives in sight — to improve overall security, to improve the performance, and most importantly to improve the user experience.

Store Locator Plus® 5.7 was recently released to the WordPress community with several key security updates.   These updates will help ensure proper data security and integrity on sites that run the standalone WordPress plugin offering.   The security updates are automatically being included in the SaaS platform and require no action on the part of our SaaS platform users.

We are working on version 5.8 for both the WordPress plugins and the SaaS platform, which will include further security updates as well as some JavaScript performance updates as we start to employ new coding standards in the JavaScript engine.

Once we get the foundation solid, we will start working on the User Experience and feature requests.   If there is something you’d like to see in our SaaS offering, please let us know in the forums or by reaching out to us via the email form.