ShieldPRO 18.2 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 18.2 for WordPress sees an overhaul of Shield’s Activity Logging feature, so that we can capture more events, regardless of whether WordPress is running as the event occurs.

To accompany these activity logging improvements, we’ve also created the Change Reporting feature (in beta).

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.

New Added Features

You can now create summary and detailed reports for important changes on your WordPress site.

Change Reporting feature uses the data from the Activity Log to generate the report, so the data is same, but it presents only the relevant portions of that data.

It’ll extract the relevant information buried within your logs and present to you a report of everything that’s changed between any 2 dates.

This feature can be found under the Reports section > Changes:

Read more about this feature here.

  • Additional Security Admin Protection

Security Admin now protects the WordPress Permalinks and the New User Default Role options.

  • Activity Log tracking for Shield options saving

For 18.2.8 release, we added Activity Log tracking for Shield options saving.

Example:

Changes

For 18.2 release we've made the following changes

  • "IP Blocking" section, under the main Config menu, renamed to "Bot Blocking".

  • "Auto Clean" option for Activity Log renamed to "Log Retention".

The same change was made for the Traffic Log too.

Improvements

For 18.2 release we've made the following improvements

  • Huge improvements to WordPress Activity Logging

    Shield now captures events such as plugin/theme uninstallation and user password updates. It alos now logs changes to the site that were done 'outside' of the WordPress environment. It can capture changes to critical WordPress core options that were modified directly on WordPress DB, for example.

    More Info

  • ShieldPRO 18.2 now requires a minimum WordPress version of 5.7.
  • We’ve done a huge body of work to clean up the code and make it easier to maintain and a little more performant.
  • Updated some JS & CSS assets. (18.2.4 patch release)
  • 18.2.8 patch release
    • Provide ability to filter activity & request log tables by logged-in user.
    • Refactor & optimise how Shield options are stored, reducing WordPress DB entries.
    • Implemented a new system that automatically restores your site's configuration to its Pro status if it gets reactivated after losing it.
    • Updated built-in helpdesk links.
    • Provide an easily access function to trigger manual scans.
    • Performance improvements when loading activity log and traffic log tables.
  • 18.2.11 patch release
    • Vulnerability scanning is more efficient.
    • Improvements and performance optimisation in several areas.
    • Improvements and optimizations to many SQL queries.

Fixes

For 18.2.4 patch release we've made the following fixes

  • Refactored license verification to reduce chances of licenses being deactivated.
  • Other smaller bug fixes.

For 18.2.8 patch release we made snapshots performance improvements and fixes for some edge cases.

For 18.2.11 patch release we mitigated a potential error on upgrade.

For more information on the ShieldPRO 18.2, read the release article here.