v3.5.1 is also a release resulting from your valuable feedback. The user “the-burger” posted in his review that “This plugin is simply the best maps plugin available. Period.”, which I very much appreciated 🙂
Nethertheless he also mentioned the high PHP memory consumption which I did not have in focus so far. So I started digging into the code and found that the settings class is adding lots of overhead to all pages – backend and frontend.
I analyzed this issue together with John Cotton (http://www.dynamicarray.co.uk/ – an expert when dealing with PHP/WordPress issues you should definitely contact when having a problem 😉 ) and found some quick wins in order to reduce memory usage and thus also plugin load time.
For future versions I might consider restructuring the settings page even more, but as delivering constant quality & not breaking any parts of my plugin is a high priority for me, I decided to implemented the identified quick win here first.
One personal request: as WordPress added a new review feature for plugins hosted on wordpress.org, I kindly invite you to leave your opinion about my plugin at http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/leaflet-maps-marker.
If you want to keep up to date with the latest Maps Marker development, please follow @MapsMarker on twitter, on Facebook or Google+
And now let´s get into the highlights of v3.5.1:
optimized frontend PHP memory usage and reduced plugin load time by 30%
The settings class now only gets loaded within WordPress admin pages and not on frontend pages anymore as not needed there. The memory usage on my test server decreased by 2MB on frontend and the load time of the plugin was ~30% faster on average (0,029 instead of 0,041 sec).
Portuguese – Brazil (pt_BR) translation
Thanks to Andre Santos, http://pelaeuropa.com.br and Antonio Hammerl, Leaflet Maps Marker is now also available in Portugues/Brazil (locale pt_BR).
show marker icon and shadow image checks on plugin pages only
The check for marker shadow url, marker icon directory, and marker icon url I introduced in v3.4.2 has been moved from global admin notices to plugin´s pages header only. This is due to some not yet fully identified problems on certain hosts where this warning appears although settings are correct. Since v3.5 you can also disable these warnings in Settings / Misc via the option “admin notices” if you encounter any problems on your installation.
Other changes/optimizations
Bugfixes
Translations updates
Thanks to many motivated contributors, v3.5.1 comes with the following translation updates:
Updated translations
If you want to contribute to translations (Persian would be great 😉 ), please visit http://translate.mapsmarker.com/projects/lmm for more information.
Outlook – my plans for the next release
I am still working on the pro version. Please subscribe to this blog (via RSS or Email) or follow @MapsMarker on twitter if you want to stay up to date. Integration of Google Adsense for Maps for example is already finished – see this post for a preview. Next on my task list: marker clustering 🙂
Full changelog (show previous changelogs)
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optimized frontend PHP memory usage and reduced plugin load time by 30% |
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Portuguese – Brazil (pt_BR) translation thanks to Andre Santos, http://pelaeuropa.com.br and Antonio Hammerl |
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show marker icon and shadow image checks on plugin pages only |
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update jQuery-Timepicker-Addon to v1.2 and compress file with jscompress.com |
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update jQuery for TinyMCE-button to v1.8.3 |
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custom icon directory could not be set (thanks burgerdev for reporting!) |
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updated Chinese translation thanks to John Shen, http://www.synyan.net |
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updated Danish translation thanks to Mads Dyrmann Larsen |
How to download / update
You can download the latest version here. The easiest way to update is to use the WordPress update process: login with an user who has admin privileges, navigate to Dashboard / Updates, select plugins to update and press the button “Update Plugins”. Alternatively you can also download the current version here, unzip the package and overwrite the plugin´s files on your webserver.