Map Software Archives | Store Locator Plus®

Locator Performance and Category Improvements

Store Locator Plus® was recently updated to further improve the performance of the application. In addition the user experience for location categories has been updated, addressing shortcomings in the category legend rendering methodology.

Performance Improvements

After implementing security patches requested by the plugin management team over at WordPress.com, we noticed several administrative pages on our plugin as well as on our SaaS service were running slower than usual. After an extensive performance analysis of the underlying code, we were able to isolate the change and improve performance of that module by several orders of magnitude, saving up to 15 seconds per locator settings page request.

Time to execute the subquery improved from approximately 11 seconds to < 1 second. Memory consumption for that routine dropped from 5.4MB / request to 1MB / request.

Store Locator Plus® performance and category improvements.

Google Maps for JavaScript Update

Posted by lcleveland in Google Maps, Map Software, MySLP SaaS, Release Notes, Store Locator, Store Locator Plus, WPSLP

Store Locator Plus® was recently updated to accommodate the latest Google Maps for JavaScript update which now requires a callback parameter. Third party hosted scripts such as the Google Maps for JavaScript library, a foundational component of Store Locator Plus®, can change how they operate at any time and without warning to the developers that employ these scripts. Thankfully the recent Google Maps change that makes a new callback parameter required only generates a warning. If this follows in the footsteps of prior Google Maps updates, it will one day suddenly be required and many sites that do not update the script deployment will fail.

For our clients using the WordPress plugins, this means you will need to update the Store Locator Plus® plugin before Google “flips the switch”. For our SaaS users, you do not have to do anything — we’ve already updated the library for you.

Our Store Locator January 2023 Updates

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

Store Locator Plus® has been updated to patch various minor bugs and to improve code design as we move toward implementing new React applets that will modernize the user experience. The updates in our mid-January release should be transparent to most users. No action is required for our SaaS platform users. WordPress plugin users will want to update to the latest version when convenient.

Patches To Our Store Locator Include…

Fix remote web asset test algorithm. This algorithm would sometimes generate a missing variable warning for urlToFetch. In some cases this would cause Store Locator Plus® to think remote web assets (images, CSS files, and other objects hosted on a different website) to show as missing. This has been resolved.

Update code variables, global naming conventions, and related background development elements. These changes are non-functional changes. They are mostly code comments that provide hints to the integrated development environments used by our developers to provider smarter code hints, autocompletion, and quality control services. These changes do not affect functionality.