WordPress PHP 8.1 Compatibility August 2022

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

We have received a couple of reports about Store Locator Plus® for WordPress not working with PHP 8.1.  The  WordPress PHP 8.1 compatibility is officially listed as “not compatible” in January 2022 and remains that way today (August 20th, 2022).   There is no official release date for WordPress on PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 at this time.

Officially WordPress supports PHP 7.4.  As such, Store Locator Plus® for WordPress is only officially supported on PHP 7.4.

Users of the Store Locator Plus® SaaS service don’t have to worry about this. We’ve taken care of ensuring the location service is running on a stable platform

WordPress PHP 8.0 Status

However, we have tested WordPress on PHP 8.0 along with the latest release of theStore Locator Plus® for WordPress plugin.  It does appear to be working normally without notable warnings or errors.   While not officially supported, we do believe you can run WordPress and Store Locator Plus® for WordPress on PHP 8.0 without any issues.   With that in mind, we are providing support and patching services for the Store Locator Plus® for WordPress with PHP 8.0 installations.

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Store Locator Plus® Patches Search Form Name Label

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

Store Locator Plus® Release Notes
SaaS 2022.08.08 / WordPress 5.14

Store Locator Plus® has been updated for the early August 2022 release.   This impacts both the WordPress plugins and the SaaS product.     Users of the WordPress plugins will need to download and update to the latest releases.   SaaS users will see these updates automatically.

MySLP SaaS All Levels

A patch has been put into place on the JavaScript core method that reduces network I/O from REST API calls when rendering map labels.    The pre-patched version would consider various labels as not being set if a user was setting a label to an empty string.  This created a REST API call for every location that was being displayed to fetch new label information.  This patch reduces those calls to a single REST API request per page render versus per-location rendered.

MySLP SaaS Professional and Enterprise Updates

This release patches search form name labels and the name placeholder.   These settings were not being honored.  The functionality has been restored.

The map search form “Hide Address Entry” has been patched to hide ONLY the address input box, not the entire search form.

Version Info

The changes noted above can be found in the following update.

Store Locator Plus® (SaaS Edition) : 2022.08.08
Store Locator Plus® for WordPress: 5.14.X
Store Locator Plus® for WP : Experience: 5.14.X

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.