ShieldPRO 9.1 is an exciting release as it build upon previous developments to bring some of our most exciting developments to-date.

This release is packed full of great new features so there’s something for everyone. We’ve written about some of them already, but we’ll outline all the major developments in this article.

#1 WP-CLI Support For ShieldPRO

This feature is only possible because of the underlying code advances we’ve been making over the past 12 months.

Whether you know what WP-CLI is for WordPress, or you don’t know, we cover all the important points you need in this announcement, so you can get started with Shield’s WP-CLI super quickly.

#2 FIDO U2F Two-Factor Authentication

We’ve been busting to get this into Shield as we’re huge proponents of strong 2-Factor Authentication (2FA).

We use 2FA everywhere it’s available, so we wanted U2F on our WordPress sites too.

The reason is simple – protecting our online assets with a simple username and password just isn’t enough anymore. You really must use 2FA for any services that are important to you.

We can’t stress point this enough – use 2-factor authentication everywhere!

But, 2FA can be awkward – it adds friction. The solution isn’t to avoid 2FA, but to find the easiest method of 2FA available.

Email and Google Authenticator are awkward, though not unreasonable (they’re better than SMS!)

A Yubikey OTP (One Time Password) is much better.

But U2F is a pleasure to use.

ShieldPRO 9.1 brings U2F support to your WordPress site.

#3 Custom Email Templates

We get requests nearly each week to be able to customise the content of emails sent by ShieldPRO. It isn’t a simple thing to provide, which is why it’s taken a while for us to implement.

We don’t have an article on this feature yet, but you can learn how it works by reading the documentation on our helpdesk.

At the time of writing, we only support custom email templates for 1 email – the 2-Factor Authentication code – but this will grow over time.

#4 Affiliate Rewards

ShieldPRO customers will soon be able to earn affiliate commissions when they recommend Shield to other people.

To make it even easier, we’ve automatically integrated your affiliate referral IDs in the Shield Plugin Badge, so that for any visitor that clicks the badge on your sites and goes on to purchase Shield, you’ll get the affiliate reward for this.

We’re still ironing out the details to the affiliate program, so there will be more information to come.

We removed the options search bar in ShieldPRO 9.0 as we weren’t aware of whether customers were even using this. We felt it was untidy and needed a makeover, so we just removed it.

Whoops! It turns out that many customers liked this feature as a way of jumping to Shield options quickly.

So we’ve brought it back for ShieldPRO 9.1, but it’s now a little better.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Along with the new features, we’ve improved many different things and squashed a few bugs including:

  • We’ve renamed “Security Admin Key” to “Security Admin PIN“. For some reason this “key” got confused with license key all-too-often.
  • Adding an IPv6 CIDR range failed when the address was too long
  • Improved database initialisation so that there are no errors trying to access a database that doesn’t exist yet.
  • The “remember me” feature for 2FA now includes the IP address to lock this down a bit further.

There are always more things that get fixed and improved along the way that don’t make it into the final changelog. ShieldPRO 9.1 is our best yet!

Feedback, Comments and Suggestions

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for all our features that we’ve outlined.

There’s a lot to digest with this article, but we trust that there will be something here to get you as excited for ShieldPRO 9.1 as we are!