Shield Security v6.8 for WordPress released 11th June, 2018.

This release for Shield Security sees 1 new major feature, and quite a number of improvements.

White Label Security – Build and Strengthen Your Own Brand

It’s been a long-time in coming, but White Label for the Shield Security plugin is available for all Pro subscriptions from v6.8.

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘White Label’, it simply means that you can change the name of the plugin as it’s displayed on your WordPress admin area.

This lets you re-brand our security plugin as your own. Why would you want to do this?

If you deploy and manage WordPress sites for your clients, your brand as a WordPress agency is critically important to customer acquisition and retention. The more you can put in place to consolidate and strengthen your brand image, the better.

White Label lets you achieve this by essentially renaming the Shield plugin to whatever you would like it to be. It ensures a more consistent brand offering and presents your business offering as a more holistic, integrated solution.

What happens when you enable White Label?

The following changes will take place when you setup your White Label:

  • The WP admin menu for the plugin will be renamed and the icon displayed in the menu will be updated to use your icon.
  • The plugin name displayed on the plugins page will be renamed
  • The ‘details’ link in the plugins page will be updated to your link
  • The option to edit the plugin files directly from Plugin Editor screen (if you haven’t disabled editing) will be removed
  • If you enable the option, non-Security Admin users will not see available updates listed in the plugins/updates pages
  • Any emails sent out to users will display your custom plugin name in place of “Shield Security”
How to enable White Label?

White Label is a Shield Pro option. You will not be able to turn this on without an active Pro license.

We’ve integrated White Label into the Security Admin module. This means that in order to access it, and enable it, you’ll need to be the Security Admin for the site.

If you haven’t already setup the Security Admin access, you’ll need to do this first before any of your White Label settings will take effect.

Login Notification Emails For All Users

Shield v6.8 comes with the option to send email notifications to all users upon successful login. This is a pro feature and has a couple of points that you should note:

  • Notification email is not sent if 2-factor authentication is enabled (this prevents 2FA emails + login notification emails)
  • If the email address of the “admin notification email” is the same as the email address for the user logging on, a 2nd notification email will not be sent.

Complete rebuild and simplification of login bot protection and Google reCAPTCHA

With the growing complexity of login protection and the use of Google reCAPTCHA, we have completely rebuilt the implementation of this system.

The settings have been simplified so that you can now simply select which forms are protected and then which protection mechanisms are used on those forms.

There is no way to have 1 model of protection on 1 form, and different model of protection on another. For example, you if you have the cooldown system and Google reCAPTCHA active for the login form, and then you turn on protection for the registration form, then the same mechanisms for protection will be applied to both forms.

We have done our best to ensure that previous settings are translated to the new settings, but if you should check to ensure that your settings are exactly as you would like them to be on your site.

Import/Export Reliability Improvements

We discovered certain serious bugs in the reliability of the automated import/export system after receiving a number of reports from our customers.

We’ve fixed several important bugs in this system as well as improved upon the Master-Slave site communication and notification of changes.

When you have the option on that notifies “slave” sites, these sites will be notified after around 15 seconds that they need to update their settings. Then, after a further 12 seconds, if there has been no further notification to update in that time, they’ll initiate the export from the “master” site.

Note that these timings are based on the WordPress cron and so are not exact. But generally speaking, the full update should take around 30-40 seconds.

Many other under-the-hood improvements and fixes

A lot of general improvements and fixes have been put in place for this release that go a long way to improving reliability and stability of the system.

Question and Comments

If you ahve any questions or comments about these new features or existing features, please do leave us a comment below or jump into our Facebook group and leave your comments there.