WordPress SEO 2.2

Both WordPress SEO Premium and the free version of WordPress SEO have been updated to version 2.2. This new release brings quite a few changes and some nice new additions. We’ll explain the changes in this post.

Security fixes

This release contains a fix for a potential XSS issue in the admin, specifically the snippet preview. It was caused by issues in our JS, which is why also did another overhaul of our admin JS. The XSS issue required you to be logged in, so the risk level was relatively low.

Community input

This release contains code that was suggested by 5 people outside of the core WordPress SEO development team. We particularly want to highlight and thank Gary Jones as he’s done several great suggestions for this release. We’ve also had great feedback from Gary and several others on how to improve the accessibility of the plugin, all of those changes are incorporated in this release.

No more tracking class

We’ve removed our external tracking. We were doing opt-in tracking of a couple hundred thousand sites, but as WordPress.org is improving how it does its stats, we’d rather focus on other things. This means we’ll no longer give you a popup asking for permission on new installs.

Recognize your redirects

Recently, while Joost was helping on a major domain migration, he couldn’t locate which bit of code was creating a particular redirect. Annoying as this was, he decided it was time to invent a new HTTP header, to be sent right before a redirect header. This header, X-Redirect-By, identifies the piece of software that created the redirect. We’ve implemented it in WordPress SEO immediately and hope it’ll save a few of our users a headache at some time.

Premium: better redirect notices

We improved the notices that urge you to redirect changed / deleted posts and terms if you’re using WordPress SEO Premium. These should help you to keep your site optimized. If you’re not using WordPress SEO Premium yet, you really should consider it. Not only will you get more features and support from our team, you’ll also help fund the further development of the entire plugin.

Integration with other plugins

We love it when plugins integrate nicely with our SEO plugin. Nested Pages is one of those. It’s an intuitive drag and drop interface for pages in the admin. It’s so nice, we dare say it’s what the WordPress interface should look like. When you run WordPress SEO, it highlights the SEO score (through our simple color coded circles) right on the overview.

Joost recently submitted a patch for Nested Pages so it will show blue for noindexed pages, a patch that was promptly accepted. We love open source!

We’ve done some work in this release to make sure that we in turn integrate well with Nested Pages. This means that when you delete a page, the notice you get to redirect the URL will work, which it didn’t before because you weren’t on the normal edit pages screen.

Other bugfixes & changes

A couple of the changes we’ve done:

Redirect to about
Quite a few people complained about the redirect to our about page after an update. We’ve heard you and changed how it works. You’ll now get a dismissible notice with a link to the release notes, we’ll no longer redirect you.

Fixed multisite settings import
You should now be able to properly import settings on multisite environments.

Facebook Insights authentication
Next to moving this to the bottom of the Facebook tab (it’s not that important), we’ve changed how you can authenticate to get access to Facebook insights. This knowledge base article is probably the best explanation. If you were already authenticated you don’t need to change anything.

Under the hood
Also in this release, we’ve cleaned up all our JavaScript and, more important: documented all of it and made sure it no longer gives JS Hint warnings. We did more cleanup like this, in our continuous effort to both write better code and improve how we do so.

News SEO

Our News SEO plugin has had a small update too, fixing some sitemap caching issues people were having. If you don’t know our other premium SEO plugins, check them out.