ShieldPRO 9.2 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 9.2 for WordPress comes packed with new features and improvements.

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

Firstly, we're going to explain which new features you may want to review.

New Added Features

For 9.2 release we added 

• [PRO feature] Magic Email Links To Unblock Logged-In Users

This feature can be found under the Block Bad IPs/Visitors module:

When your logged-in site users get blocked by Shield, they can unblock their IP automatically by using a "magic" link:

• [PRO feature] File Locker - Root Web.Config

This feature can be found under the Hack Guard module:

Web.Config is Windows/IIS only. To enable this feature, you'll need to be on IIS web server. If not, this will show as "unavailable":

• [FREE feature] Clean WP Files

This feature can be found under the WP Lockdown module:

You can use this feature to automatically delete WordPress files that aren't necessary.

The cleanup process runs once each day.

Files Deleted: wp-config-sample.phpreadme.htmllicense.txt

Changes

We've made the following changes

• The User Management module
  Session cookie renamed from icwp-wpsf to wp-icwp-wpsf because some plugin devs feel a cookie is only important if it begins with wp-. 
• Upgraded shipped Bootstrap libraries to latest available (v4.5.2).

Compatibility

We provide native support for protection on WP Members plugin login/registration forms.

Improvements

We've made the following improvements: 

• v9.2 release
  • Automatic updates notification email is now only sent if on WordPress < 5.5.
  • Automatic updates notification email setting also applies to plugin/theme update emails.
  • Use WP Fastest Cache method to prevent caching of block pages. Whether it makes a difference is another thing.
  • Prevent spurious output from errors not relating to this plugin from affecting display of our admin pages.
  • `forceoff` file detection improved.
  • The File Locker is less likely to trigger an open_basedir warning.

Fixes

We've made the following fixes

• v9.2 release
  • Cleaned some WP-CLI PHP notices on certain commands.
  • Upgraded the database to support much larger values for the IP offenses counter.
  • MemberPress support had a bug where certain forms weren't checked for bots.
• v9.2.1 release
  • User session IDs weren’t cleared correctly. 

For more information on Shield 9.2 release, read this blog article here. 

Important: Shield 9.2 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.