Store Locator Plus® October Update Brings User Experience Updates

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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.

Store Locator Plus® Updates On The Way

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.

SEO Pages and 12-Column Grid Support

Users of our WordPress Power plugin get some new layout control features for our Pages SEO module.   Users of our fully managed service will have to wait until later this year for our SEO page builder to be fully tested before getting that feature into our  Enterprise accounts.   MySLP users on the Power, Professional, or Enterprise accounts did get some other patches — see the end of this post.

12-Column Grid Support

Many sites, including thousands of WordPress themes, employ a common 12-Column grid layout system via the inclusion of various UI Frameworks.  Frameworks such as Foundation, Bootstrap, and Vuetify are just a few CSS + JavaScript libraries that are used to build reactive and responsive themes.