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 in 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.

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Store Locator Settings

Posted by lcleveland in MySLP SaaS, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus for WordPress users should skip version 4.9.11 of the base plugin (Store Locator Plus) update.  Installing that release will reset some settings for the plugin including the layout settings for users that have the Experience add on.

The problem has been located and is patched in the 4.9.12 release that was published moments ago.

Full Restore

If you updated to 4.9.11 you will need to restore your SLP settings from a backup of the site made prior to the SLP 4.9.11 update.

Selective Restore of Settings

Experienced users can restore the following two entries from the wp_options table from a prior backup of the site if you do not wish to do a full site restore:

option_names: csl-slplus-options and csl-slplus-options_nojs

If you are not sure how to restore select options from the wp_options table your best alternative is a standard full site restore.

No locations are lost/changed during this process. They are stored in a separate location.

For Users With No Custom Layouts

If you updated to 4.9.11 of Store Locator Plus but are not using the Experience add on you may be able to update to SLP 4.9.12 and restore standard styling by doing to Settings > View > Gallery Styles and selecting one of our default styles for your site.  If you were using the Default style select Default With Font Tweaks , activate it, then select Default to re-load the layout controls from our servers.

MySLP Managed Service

Most users were not impacted by this bug.  The select few users there were impacted by the 18.0320 update last week have had their prior settings restored.

If you are using MySLP and think your settings were changed and your account was not reset, please let us know within 30 days so we can manually recover your prior settings.