WordPress SEO 2.1: release notes

As we don’t want to drown these release notes in the bigger security news, we’ve made it into a separate post. WordPress SEO 2.1 (both free and premium have the same version number now) contains a series of bugfixes but also some enhancements I’d like to highlight in this post.

These changes come on top of the (arguably bigger) changes I mentioned in my post last Friday, be sure to read that if you haven’t yet.

WordPress 4.2 ready

This release makes sure that WordPress SEO behaves well with WordPress 4.2, of which the release is imminent. Most importantly it makes sure the taxonomy metadata is carried over well.

Twitter cards enabled by default

Recently, Twitter removed the need to validate your site before Twitter cards worked. This made it possible for us to enable Twitter cards by default, which we’ve done in this release. Now, if you’re installing WordPress SEO on a new site, you’ll get Twitter Cards as soon as you’ve activated the plugin.

We’ve also removed the use of the twitter:url meta tag, as Twitter no longer uses it and uses the canonical instead.

Update the Facebook API to its latest version

Changes like these are the kind of under the hood changes that nobody notices but are important nonetheless: Facebook has updated its API to a new version and is deprecating the old one. This leads to us being required to update the code in our plugin. You’ll notice some minor interface changes, but most of the stuff is under the hood.

Plugin conflict notices

Some plugins don’t really work together. For instance if two plugins add Facebook OpenGraph code to a page, Facebooks output becomes uncontrollable. For this reason we’re showing conflict notices when you install a plugin that does something our plugin does too. You can ignore them if you want to, but it should help prevent the “huh why isn’t this working” type issues.

Validation messages everywhere!

If you’re using a featured image for your social meta data, and that image is too small to work with Facebook, we’ll now show you an error. Also, if you’re editing title and description templates on the SEO → Titles & Metas page and you use a variable that isn’t available for that template, we’ll give you a helpful warning.