ShieldPRO 9.1 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 9.1 release is packed full of great new features so there’s something for everyone

This guide outlines what have been added, changed, or improved and what fixes we've made.

Firstly, we're going to explain what major changes are made and which options you'd need to review.

Change 1: The return of the options search bar

We removed the options search bar in ShieldPRO 9.0 as we weren’t aware of whether customers were even using this. We felt it was untidy and needed a makeover, so we just removed it.

But, it turns out that many customers liked this feature as a way of jumping to Shield options quickly.

So we’ve brought it back for ShieldPRO 9.1, but it’s now a little better - turned it into a modal dialog:

Change 2: Security Admin access key rename

We’ve renamed “ Security Admin Key” to “Security Admin PIN“. For some reason this “key” got confused with license key all-too-often.

Old name, "Security Admin access key"

New name, "Security Admin PIN"

New Added Features

For 9.1 release we added

  • [PRO feature] WP-CLI support for ShieldPRO (beta)
    This feature is only possible because of the underlying code advances we’ve been making over the past 12 months.

    Whether you know what WP-CLI is for WordPress, or you don’t know, we cover all the important points you need in this announcement, so you can get started with Shield’s WP-CLI super quickly.

    To enable this functionality, simply go to the General settings and ensure that "Allow WP-CLI" option is enabled:

    And then, you can start using it, for example:


[PRO feature]  FIDO U2F Two-Factor Authentication

  • Protecting our online assets with a simple username and password just isn’t enough anymore. You really must use 2FA for any services that are important to you.

    FIDO U2F is a standardised protocol designed to enable “relying parties to offer a strong cryptographic 2nd factor option for end user security”.

    Simply-put it’s a powerful 2nd factor that you can use to secure access to your WordPress login.

    WordPress U2F Authentication for advanced login security is available in the Shield's Login Guard module => Hardware 2FA:


[PRO feature]   Custom email templates

  • Starting with Shield 9.1, we'll be offering the ability to change the content shown to users through the use of custom templates.

    In Shield 9.1, we only support custom email templates for 1 email – the 2-Factor Authentication code:


    But this will grow over time.

    You can learn how it works by reading the documentation on our helpdesk here.

  • Affiliate Rewards
    ShieldPRO customers will soon be able to earn affiliate commissions when they recommend Shield to other people.

    To make it even easier, we’ve automatically integrated your affiliate referral IDs in the Shield Plugin Badge, so that for any visitor that clicks the badge on your sites and goes on to purchase Shield, you’ll get the affiliate reward for this.

    We’re still ironing out the details to the affiliate program, so there will be more information to come.

    Note: At the moment, to participate in our affiliate rewards program, please ensure that Shield Plugin Badge is turned on in the General settings:

    Plugin badge will be displayed on your site:


Improvements

We've made the following improvements: 

  • 9.1 release
    • WP-Config File Locker protection now correctly display the file diff for empty lines. 
    • Plugin upgrade handling. 
    • The “Remember Me” feature for 2FA now includes the IP address to lock this down a bit further.

Fixes

We've made the following fixes

  • v9.1 release
    • Adding an IPv6 CIDR range failed when the address was too long.
    • Improved database initialisation so that there are no errors trying to access a database that doesn’t exist yet.
    • Upgrade Carbon PHP library to latest available (v1.39).

For more information on Shield 9.1 release, read this blog article here.

Important: Shield 9.1 supports PHP 5.x. However, PHP 5.x is old, really very old. Maintaining a plugin the size and scope of ShieldPRO for many different PHP version is an extra load we no longer wish to carry.

Starting from ShieldPRO 10.0, we’ll no longer be support PHP 5.x, and will instead move to a minimum required version of PHP 7.0.