Power v5.13 Addresses Location Categorization Issue

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Version 5.13 of the Store Locator Plus® Power add on for WordPress plugins was released today.    The update is a minor one as we continue to clean up the WordPress plugin family.  Multiple updates are expected in the next few weeks in preparation for better SaaS integration , user experience improvements, and general feature improvements.

In Power v5.13

Add new location category was logging a warning about an undefined or null variable reference.   This has been resolved.

Power – On The Radar

For the WordPress plugins we are aware of an issue related to the SEO pages functionality and an array offset warning that comes up when creating an SEO page.   This is on the R&D schedule to be addressed in an upcoming release.   Current estimate is to have an update ready in less than 30 days.

Store Locator Plus® SaaS Impact

The issues resolved in Power 5.13 do not affect functionality or performance of the MySLP SaaS platform.   As such the updates included here will be published in combination with other updates in a future upgrade to the MySLP platform.

Store Locator Plus® PHP 8 Compatible & Relisting Status

Posted by lcleveland in Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

This past week we published an updated version of the base Store Locator Plus® WordPress plugin for version 5.12.4.  This patch allows Store Locator Plus® to run in PHP 8 environments despite WordPress itself clearly stating PHP 8 is NOT officially supported in the core WordPress install.

Unfortunately you still need to go to our main WordPress site to get the latest release.   The WordPress plugin team has yet to approve our plugin for listing in the direct despite providing a patch for the initial security concern during the summer of 2021.

Speaking of Relisting…

We have been working on literally hundreds of code changes to meet the new strict demands of the WordPress plugin team.  They insisted on a full code scan and review of all data I/O calls and required that we publish hundreds of escaping and sanitizing methods throughout.  While some of these updates did help close potential security holes, many of the changes flagged by the “AI bot code sniffer” were not true security weaknesses; This highlights a notable concern when humans employ digital intelligence tools to make decisions — but that is a debate for another day.

For now, we have spent hundreds of hours running the scanning tools we found for analyzing the code, evaluating thousands of warnings, and addresses dozens of legitimate concerns.  We worked around hundreds of false flags in the reports. The end result is a new version of the base plugin that is a good bit more secure against potential security issues.

The latest problems uncovered in testing have not come about from our security updates, but uncovered fundamental breaking changes in WordPress core.     WordPress has put the emphasis on block themes and the supporting core utilities that support them.   This has broken fundamental features of WordPress and has changed the order of precedence in which their hooks-and-filters are called.   This leads to notably different behavior in plugins and themes — not just Store Locator Plus®. Thankfully our QA team has found the issues with these new WordPress behaviors before we released our latest update and we have been working diligently to resolve them.   Our hope is the new 5.13 release not only passes the WordPress security scan but also works better than our 5.12 release when it comes to new block-based themes while retaining full compatibility with legacy themes.

With that said, we are hoping to pass our QA tests soon and have a new 5.13 release officially listed in the WordPress plugin directory.     Then we can start focusing on new features and a user experience overhaul that all of our customers can enjoy — including our SaaS customers.

Speaking of the SaaS version, thankfully none of these security things impact the SaaS version.   For those of you that switched over to the Saas release — we’ll have new features and UX updates coming your way later this year!

More JavaScript and Security Improvements for Store Locator Plus®

Posted by lcleveland in Map Software

Store Locator Plus® was updated today to bring additional JavaScript and security improvements to the map and locator application.

The security improvements are based on feedback from the user community and are not related to direct reports of security threats.  The security concerns only impact users of the self-managed WordPress plugins.  The vast majority of the work was done on administrative access and sanitizing of input values.   SaaS users are not impacted by these issues.

The JavaScript improvements include a new order-of-precedence system that eliminates some redundancy when processing JavaScript files, especially with the Professional and Enterprise level SaaS accounts.   The improvement means slightly faster script loading times.     WordPress plugin users are also impacted by this performance issue, and should update the entire Store Locator Plus® plugin stack to the latest release.

Bug Fixes

Along with the JavaScript improvements, a few bug fixes are included:

  • Enterprise clients using cluster map markers may have experience map outages , this is resolved.
  • Enterprise clients using the location loading indicator set to ‘circle’ had issues with the map not displaying, this is resolved.
  • Improvements have been made for users entering invalid JSON settings for the Google Map Style. Invalid JSON would prevent the JavaScript engine from loading.  Invalid values are now ignored. This issue impacted our Professional level subscribers.

Updating Your Location Software

The Software as a Service version of the application was updated overnight.  Users of the SaaS platform do not need to take any action to receive the latest features and patches.

The above issues also impacted all WordPress plugin users and require updating to the latest release.  The folks at WordPress.com have yet to approve our latest updates and re-list the main plugin.  You’ll need to manually uninstall and re-install the main Store Locator Plus® plugin, which can be purchased from our WordPress plugin store.