ShieldPRO 19.1 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 19.1 is primarily a maintenance and optimisation release, but it also delivers a much-requested feature: Instant Alerts

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

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

New Added Features

For 19.1 release we added

Instantly alert you to critical security events that occur on your WordPress sites.

Instant Alerts options can be found under the General Settings:

You can be alerted

  • when the Shield plugin is deactivated
  • [Pro] to any important change on any admin account
  • [Pro] to discovery of any vulnerable plugin/theme
  • [Pro] to any changes to FileLocker items

Learn more about this here.

Until now, if there was a result that has already been processed (e.g. repaired or ignored), then that result is removed from display, never to return.

We’ve provided the ability to expand the results that are displayed on the scan results tables to include previously processed results.

You can now un-hide ignored, repaired, deleted results.

These options can be found under the Scan Results page > additional options (gear icon) > Results Display Options:

Learn more about this here.

  • Instant access to the Scan Results and Run Scans pages

Now you can access Scan Results or Run Manual Scans directly from within the main menu:

  • Filter to prevent running of the Site Health Security component

Prevent loading of WP Site Health Security Components filter details can be found here.

Changes

Change 1: Bot Blocking section renamed

We renamed Bot Blocking section to Bot/IP Blocking:

Improvements

For 19.1. release we made the following improvements

  • Code Rewrite & Cleaning

    Major overhaul of how the plugin works under-the-hood in order to simplify future development and speed-up processing.

  • Some improvements to how Shield handles WPMS

For more information on Shield 19.1 release, read this blog article here.

19.1.9 and .10 Patch Releases

Improvements

  • Attempt to automatically detect PHP-based translation files to prevent noisy scan results.
  • Attempt to identify obsolete core WordPress files which weren't properly deleted during recent upgrades, and detail this in scan results table.
  • Update assets used by the plugin.

Fixes

  • Bug: Scan results show a number of file results exists, but actual results table is empty.
  • Bug: Upgrade process for FileLocker records improved.
  • Mitigate potential fatal error during scan.
  • Fix for automatic self-update.
  • Bug: Fix for javascript error breaking parts of MainWP admin area.

19.1.16 and .19 Patch Releases

New added features

  • WP actions/hooks during the 2FA email sending process to allow for developer integration.
  • WP actions/hooks for integration with Password Expiry, Account Suspension, and Idle status queries.
  • "Purge Provider IPs" option added under the Debug Info page.

Improvements

  • Optimised loading of scan result tables so that plugin & theme tables are loaded on-demand.
  • Scan Results table improvements.
  • Remove unnecessary admin notice upon login.
  • Add contextual data to CrowdSec Signals.
  • Explicitly remove old WP auto-load options table data.

Fixes

  • Updated integration with FluentForms to support their altered codebase.
  • Funky characters in user-agents broke json_encode() - switched to wp_json_encode().
  • Fix for limitation in CrowdSec API to ensure contextual data are of the expected format.