ShieldPRO 20.1 Upgrade Guide

ShieldPRO 20.1 introduces many improvements, such as a cleaner UI, Security Profiles and Auto-Integrations features, and an updated Guided Setup Wizard. It will also require PHP 7.4+ to run.

This guide outlines what have been added/removed, 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

For 20.1 release we added

We've added FileLocker protection for the the active theme's functions.php file.

We've introduced the ability to apply pre-configured security profiles to save time during setup.

You can locate them under the main Tools menu > Guided Setup section.

Shield can automatically detect when a 3rd party plugin is active for which we have a built-in integration, and switch it on.

This option can be found under the main Tools menu > Integrations section.

You can now check against the hostname of your visitors when creating custom rules.

Added silentCAPTCHA bot detection support for Simple Membership plugin.

You can configure it under the main Tools menu > Integrations > 3rd Party User Forms Bot Checking.

Changes

Change 1: Navigation menu enhancements

To configure the all settings for each of zones/groups and tools, where applicable, there’s an easy-to-access configuration button on the main menu.

Change 2: Option description and Import/Export checkbox

We've made changes to the

These are now accessed from within the "Expand description" icon.

Example

Removed Options

We removed the following options:

  • To simplify plugin configuration, we removed an unnecessary option checkbox leaving a single option to control silentCAPTCHA on the WordPress login forms.
  • “WooCommerce Checkout” option is removed from Login Protection Zone > Brute Force Protection > Protected Forms list. Now, this is automatically applied if the WooCommerce integration is switched-on.
  • WP-CLI command info is removed from the plugin options area.

Improvements

For 20.1 release we've made the following improvements

  • PHP 7.4

    We've increased our minimum required PHP version to 7.4.

  • Security Dashboard enhancements

  • Refactored Login Cooldown System

    We've rewritten and improved the login cooldown system to work more directly with the silentCAPTCHA bot detection.

  • Added Conflict Protection

    Added protection against fatal errors caused by plugin conflicts. When conflict found, Shield is 'paused'. For now only plugin is WP RSS Aggregator.

Fixes

For 20.1 release we've made the following fixes

  • NinjaForms Integration

    Changes in NinjaForms code meant our silentCAPTCHA integration wasn't firing when it should be.

For more information on Shield 20.1 release, read the release blog article here.