On Thursday, Aug 1, 2024, we released Matador Jobs 3.8.18 to all our users. This release primarily supports updates to improve user experience issues caused by aggressive caching policies that clashed with data security handling in Matador Jobs Pro.

Caching and Data Security

To protect your site from hackers and spammers, WordPress and, by extension, Matador Jobs Pro, applies various secure coding techniques. One such technique is to send special data with form (application, contact, etc) submissions that verify the data is coming from a valid, recent version of your site and not a spoofed version. This prevents spam form submissions and other forms of misuse.

As search engine providers harp on us to deliver fast loading websites and web hosts charging us more and more to generate web pages from code, our users have naturally begun to use more and more aggressive forms of caching, including those which serve forms with stale security credentials to users. This resulted in some job applicants getting cryptic error messages when attempting to apply to roles.

While this issue is easily fixed by adjusting caching rules for any page that provides a place for a user to share data, including web forms, given our most common customer is the small business without an expert web developer on site, we saw many of our users unable to fix this issue without utilizing significant support resources from within Matador Jobs’s team.

This update includes some automation that will help bypass aggressive caching and refresh stale security credentials in a way that continues to provide secure data processing while eases the burden on our customers to fine-tune caching rules and eases user experience pain points for their job seekers applying to roles when the caching rules are not set up properly.

This update should not replace proper management of caching rules, and we strongly recommend users refer to our help docs on how to properly cache Matador Jobs Pro data to ensure these protections are eventually not needed for their site.

  • Change Notes: Added new code to address user experience issues encountered by job seekers served cached web page data that included Matador application forms with cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protections in place that were stale due to caching. This update will aim to prevent those errors and ensure a smooth experience for users without requiring adjustments to the site’s caching settings.

Beta: Preload Form Data

Some form field data can now be served as a pre-load to Matador Application Forms via a new filter. This is being offered as beta feature and will be used in upcoming core and extension features. Developers can give it a spin using the filter matador_jobs_application_form_preload_data.

  • Feature: Added a WordPress filter called matador_jobs_application_form_preload_data to add pre-load values to Application Form fields.

Miscellaneous

As always, a few other useful bug fixes were included. Further, with WordPress 6.6 recently released, we made sure to test Matador Jobs Pro on the new WordPress to ensure it still works as expected.

  • Feature: Added a WordPress filter called matador_jobs_query_jobs_args to filter the search query arguments after code-based processing is complete. This is used in some advanced extension development and should only be used when the filter for before code-based processing will not work, as code-based query arg processing is designed to protect the user from unintentional issues.
  • Bugfix: Fixes a bug that caused the Bullhorn Candidate Work History entries for newly created candidates to be missing the job title.
  • Tested up to WordPress 6.6.1.

Update Now!

Matador Jobs 3.8.18 is released for automatic* update to all subscribers as of Thursday, August 1, 2024. If your subscription has expired, renew it on your account page. If you find any issues, please send a support request.

* Please Note: if your current installed version is 3.8.0 to 3.8.4, you need to manually install this update.