The SEO Framework

= 4.1.0 = The v4.1.0 update brings a major upgrade. Make a backup of your database before updating. WordPress v5.1 (or higher) is now required. Downgrading to v4.0.7 is possible without side effects.

= 4.0.0 = The v4.0.0 update brings a major upgrade. Make a backup of your database before updating. WordPress v4.9 (or higher) and PHP v5.6 (or higher) are now required. If you use the Extension Manager, update it to v2.1.0 (or higher) before updating this plugin. Downgrading to v3.2.4 is possible, however with the caveat that the homepage title may flip its output order back.

= 3.1.1 = This is a major upgrade. Make a backup of your database before upgrading. WordPress v4.6 (or greater) and PHP v5.4 (or greater) are now required. If you use the Extension Manager, update it to v1.5.2 (or greater) before upgrading this plugin. Downgrading to v3.0.6 possible.

= 3.0.0 = A major update. Make a backup of your database before upgrading.

This minor update brings you a revamped HTML parser and a new option for tuning its accuracy for descriptions. First-time installers are now notified when metadata can be transported from other SEO plugins, the SEO Bar recognizes syntax from Rank Math, and Advanced Query Protection blocks new SEO attacks that could tank your rankings. We also fixed a couple of bugs.

Psst: Check out our Cyber Sale.

This patch resolves an issue with WordPress 6.1, which queries template parts before posts are requested. This premature query causes TSF to fail in recognizing support for Custom Post Types, preventing all meta output.

This minor update addresses a change in WordPress 6.0 that causes taxonomy sitemaps to crash, allows paginated deindexing to supersede forced indexing, and improves image cropping by preserving metadata.

This minor update improves image processing, reducing TSF's load impact by roughly 20% when generating metadata. We also added WordPress 6.0 support for image filesizes, making social sharing even more robust.

This minor update addresses a regression where the singular-archive canonical URLs always pointed to the first page.

This minor update addresses a regression where the homepage canonical URL was missing a trailing slash.

This minor update addresses a few regressions brought in v4.2.0; it fixes the canonical URL for paginated categories, corrects an API typo, and rectifies a few edge cases. TSF now also supports PHP 8.1.

• Perfect =

Come with me, and you'll be in a world of pure imagination. - Gene Wilder, Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse

Release highlights

• This update brings new post-type-archive settings. You can now edit their titles, descriptions, social and visibility settings, and even add redirects on the SEO Settings page.
• Fancy a custom site title for SEO purposes only? Check out the new title settings.
• You will find that the sitemap's stylesheet now has its URLs centered; it also supports mobile devices.
• Developers can now enjoy using the new tsf() function -- an alias of the_seo_framework().
• If you're a developer, you should also check out our perfectly tuned memo(). umemo(), and fmemo() functions, which help make TSF so performant.

Psst: Check out our Cyber Sale.

Perfect

TSF is finally what I (Sybre) envisioned it to become when I first named it "The SEO Framework": It's lightning-fast, hassle-free, and has all necessary options while giving you the best in class experience. I hope you enjoy what I believe is a perfect product!

To me, The SEO Framework is finished. Done. It's excellent. This doesn't mean its journey ends here. Now, it's time to add features you want. A restyled interface, migration support, custom title generation, more structured data fields, and many other community proposals are under consideration.

A perfect tip

This update comes with updated browser styles and scripts. Not all browsers get these for you; so, the interface might appear broken (and your "inputs" seem to be "removed"). Try a different browser, or clear your favorite browser's cache. That ought to do the trick.

Environment upgrade notes

WordPress 5.1 through 5.4 are no longer supported. Here's why:

• Over 66% of all WordPress sites are using WordPress v5.5 or later.
• Newer versions of WordPress are faster, more reliable, and easier to work with; for both you and us.
• Supporting past versions takes time away that's better used implementing new features.

PHP 5.6 through 7.1 are no longer supported. Here's why:

• Almost 80% of all WordPress sites are using PHP v7.2 or later.
• Newer versions of PHP are faster and more secure. For us, they're also easier to work with.
• Again, supporting past versions takes time away that's better used implementing new features.

Support the development

We hope you'll love this update as much as we do. Please consider supporting us by sharing a fantastic review, get a license, or do your friends and colleagues a favor by installing TSF for them.

Detailed log

Practice makes perfect. So does working 16 hours a day.

This patch addresses an oversight whence primary terms could no longer get fetched.

This minor update adds support for Gutenberg 11.3.0 and fixes a few bugs.

This minor update packs a major punch. TSF now supports headless mode, cementing itself as a turnkey solution. We defenestrated the pernicious object caching mechanism, and we updated some options' defaults effective only on new sites. We improved performance iterably, fixed about 12 bugs, and enjoyed the weather. Lastly, we introduced a new API for user meta handling, among other things --- developers that wrote software interfacing with TSF are employed well reading the detailed changelog.

Before heading into 2021, we wanted to set free four bugs.

Pro tip: If you can no longer switch TSF's settings tabs, try hitting 'CMD+SHIFT+R' (Mac) or 'CTRL+SHIFT+R' (Windows); these keyboard shortcuts will force-fetch the latest scripts from your server.

In this minor update, we ensured compatibility with PHP 8 and WP 5.6. TSF now also fully integrates with WordPress Core Sitemaps, which you can configure via the SEO settings. If you decide to keep using TSF's optimized sitemap, you can now enjoy prerendering, DoS protection, and full Polylang integration. Lastly, you'll find various accessibility improvements, and we fixed about a dozen bugs.

We included a single-line self-destructing notification about our Cyber Monday sale. We hope you'll opt to support our continuous efforts. But we're also kindly asking you to understand we must promote our premium extensions to make TSF possible. We are apprehensive about any embedded advertising and self-promotion in the plugin, so we must rely on notifications until a better system is available in WordPress.

In this major-minor update, we improved browser performance by up to 99% (not a typo) by exchanging over 300 jQuery calls for vanilla JS ones. We also added two new options for oEmbed, freed a dozen bugs that got stuck in the UI and generators, and improved accessibility.

This follow-up update to 4.0.6 addresses an issue where the WooCommerce shop page was seen as an actual archive mistakenly. For that page, this issue caused your post-edit input, among other SEO data, to no longer be honored.

In this update, we addressed a few issues our amazing users helped investigate. With that, we implemented better bbPress title support, and fixed a bug regarding WooCommerce and term-ID collisions.

We also increased the entropy for generating object caching keys, addressed some translation and RTL errors, and added a few new filters.

In WordPress, we found various query endpoints that can be malformed to create broken pages. Backlinks to these pages can harm your site's ranking. In this update, we added advanced query protection, which you can enable via the robots meta settings.

The "Connected Social Pages" input fields will now disappear when you empty them. They have never proven to work, and Google has deprecated them. We also removed the transient caching for JSON-LD scripts, as it wasn't helping anyone.

On the other hand, we added a new feed indexing option, Discord sharing options (oEmbed, theme color), and the aforementioned advanced query protection option. Support for EDD and Polylang has been expanded, and we reintroduced the hyphen option for titles (which is the new default).

In this update, we bring a few other quality-of-life changes, as well. We added a dozen new filters, touched up the interface, streamlined the query handler, and fixed known corner-case issues and bugs.

WordPress 5.3 has a bug where the timezone set in PHP is taken into account when creating permalinks. Since this bug can cause canonical URLs with dates to point to a nonexistent page, we're sending out this patch where TSF sets the timezone to flat UTC for its front-end generation.

The proper fix in WordPress 5.3.1 is due in about three weeks from now, after which we'll consider reverting these changes.

Google Search has a new bug in their parser, which causes pages to be deindexed unintentionally when a specific combination of robots-settings are used. To work around this bug, we changed how the recently introduced copyright directive settings work.

For more information, see our KB entry on why the Maximum Image Preview Size setting may now be ignored.

We also fixed three bugs and added minor improvements.

France recently amended its copyright laws. In short, in France, it's now forbidden for content aggregators to display excerpts and previews of your content when no consent is given.

To accommodate those laws, Google will soon look for new directives, and we added new site-wide options to output those. These new options are disabled (unspecified) by default when you update The SEO Framework, but they are enabled (some access) by default when you install The SEO Framework on a new site. Please see this issue for our take on this.

In this update, we also fixed a few bugs and added various improvements.

In this minor update, we bring you the most advanced description generation yet. The generator is now context-sensitive, so you can expect the descriptions to be even more natural; a real time-saver!

Oh, we also fixed some bugs, and we've implemented some improvements in preparation for version 3.3.0.

This minor update fixes some old, leftover bugs. We've also removed the sitemap pinging options for Yandex, as they no longer allow this.

This minor update brings major bug fixes. Most notoriously, the home page settings now predict the metadata perfectly in the admin screens. Bloggers will love this update, too, because Facebook and Twitter metadata for the home blog page is now always correct.

For developers, please note that the upcoming major release (3.3.0) will introduce new taxonomical settings. Because the image-rendering integration isn't suited for this, it'll be overhauled. For more information, see this issue.

Also, for developers, note that some API changes better suited for a major release were also brought into this minor release; these were required to fix some bugs.

This update brings improved compatibility with WooCommerce, adds a few filters, and fixes various logic issues.

• Lionize =

Release date

• May 6th, 2018

Summarized:

• TSF now integrates completely with attachment pages.
• Non-personalized Facebook profile links can now be set via the Social SEO settings and user's Authorial Info settings.
• Seven bugs have been fixed, mainly involving descriptions and the sitemap.
• The plugin now suggests, once, that you can use Focus keywords via the Extension Manager.

For everyone, about the suggestion:

• We believe not everyone is up-to-date yet with the current progression of the extensions. Some of which can help you out greatly with SEO.
• So, from this update, all sites will get a one-time-only auto-dismissing suggestion for TSFEM.
• This suggestion has many conditions attached before being shown. So, it's likely you won't ever see it.
• We understand that not everyone welcomes this introduction. However, this suggestion is to help this plugin and your site grow, from which we all will benefit.

For developers, about descriptions:

• If you're using description-related filters or functions from TSF on your sites, check out the detailed "for developers" log.
• Many functions have been silently deprecated, and you should now use simple caller functions.
• No action is needed from your side until the next major release (ETA July 2018).

For developers, about titles ETA July 2018:

• In the next major release, we're going to change how we handle titles.
• This change won't affect users directly. But it will allow us to manipulate the titles better.
• For more information, view and subscribe to issue 202.

View the detailed log.

• Rectified =

Release date:

• February 27th, 2017

Summarized:

• An issue with outdated browsers not parsing TSF's admin JavaScript has been resolved.

View the detailed log.

• Illustrious =

Release date:

• February 25th, 2017

Did you know?

• We're working on an extension for keyword and subject analysis, named Focus.
• In its current state, it's already on par with other solutions, but we are going to take it even further.
• More details will follow in a blog post, which we'll link to on our Twitter page when the features are ready.

Summarized:

• This is a maintenance release with over 10 bugs fixed. Most notoriously were pixel guideline calculation errors and home page title errors.
• Open Graph and Twitter custom title and description options have been added to every post, page, and CPT.
• The description character count and pixel length guidelines have been updated.
• All publicly queryable CPT posts and pages now support SEO settings and are included in the sitemap. No more messing with filters is needed.

About the new description guidelines:

• Google increased their SERP's description length a few months ago, so we've updated the upper-limit guidelines.
• We recommend enforcing these new guidelines for new pages, cornerstone pages, and the home page.
• Although the description lengths have been updated, the transient cache isn't invalidated.
• Over time the cache will refresh itself, this is done automatically by WordPress, or via your caching plugin's transients handler (if applicable).

About the social meta input:

• There are new Open Graph and Twitter inputs in the SEO Settings.
• The Twitter settings, when left empty, will use the Open Graph output.
• The Open Graph settings, when left empty, will use the SEO meta output.
• As always, auto-generated Open Graph and Twitter descriptions won't use prefixes.

Found unwanted links in the sitemap?

• If you find posts in the sitemap that shouldn't be there, please refer to our renewed FAQ.
• The FAQ entry title is "The sitemap contains unwanted links".

View the detailed log.

• Diligence =

Release date:

• December 6th, 2017

Summarized:

• This update implements a workaround for an issue with bbPress, and various UI bugs have been fixed as well.

View the detailed log.

• Esteem =

Release date:

• November 23rd, 2017

Fixed:

• A fatal error no longer occurs on the wpForo Forum plugin pages.

• Terminal Queries =

Release date:

• August 30th, 2017

Summarized:

• New performance options have been added. They allow you to optimize Search and Archive query alterations.
• Schema.org JSON-LD data is now cleaner when you run PHP 5.4 or later.
• Custom input image URLs can now dynamically switch between HTTP and HTTPS and the dimensions are always set, regardless of input.
• Multisite networks no longer initiate new database connections on every page for plugin compatibility checks.

Did you know?

• Local SEO has been added to the Extension Manager.
• It increases location-aware search presence in Google Search, Google Maps, and even Google Images.

Detailed log:

• I had not overlooked them, and they shall be answered.

A highly recommended update that fixes "Home Page as Blog" query issues.

• Diminutive Consolidation =

Release date:

• May 8th, 2017

Summarized:

• Now, Polylang is officially supported by The SEO Framework.
• The sitemap now supports plain permalinks. That means it now literally works for every website.
• The robots.txt file has been enhanced, so it now informs you when the output location is incorrect.
• Moreover, various bugs have been fixed, mainly concerning third party plugins.

We're looking for translation editors:

• First, thank you so much to all the translation contributors.
• Now, if you want to see The SEO Framework in your language, head over to this page and feel free to contribute.
• If you wish to easily maintain and keep a close eye on all the contributions for your language, ask us to ask WordPress Polyglots to add you as a contributor.
• Ultimately, it's up to the WordPress Polyglots team to fulfill your request. It generally depends on how well you've submitted translations for you to be accepted.

A few notes about translations:

• If you use a machine to translate for you, note that they can generate out-of-context strings. So keep an eye out for those!
• If you notice that strings are very hard to translate, e.g. because of grammatical gender, let us know!
• Please don't translate "The SEO Framework", it's a registered brand-name.
• Be sure not to add spaces if you see backticks, asterisks, or brackets. They're used for Markdown language construction.
• In TSF, you generally can't use UTF character codes like ♡, as they're automatically removed or rendered unreadable for added security. Add them as displayed instead: ****.

Detailed log:

If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.

• Sovereign Comprehension =

Release date:

• 27th March 2017

Summarized:

• This release patches a few bugs that were brought with the 2.9.0 release related to debugging and cache clearing.
• And if you like to use quick edit a lot, the SEO Bar will now also re-render on save.

Detailed log:

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

• Equitable Erudition =

Courage is found in unlikely places - J.R.R. Tolkien

Release date:

• 25th March 2017

Summarized:

• This update focuses on fixing bugs and expanding the API for developers.
• To expand the API for per page (in-post) SEO settings, tabs had to be added in the SEO settings metabox.
• The JavaScript code has also been overhauled to improve performance and allow third party implementation.
• Moreover, the home page settings now allow you to upload a social image.
• Structured data markup has also been improved, like the inclusion of an alternative Sitename and fixes for Breadcrumb images.
• The sitemap can now include the blog page. The lastmod value of which listens to multiple pages to automatically determines what's best.
• Unfortunately, Twitter has removed support for photo cards. This update makes sure that the regarding settings correctly convert to the current format.

Only one week left for the earliest of early-bird discounts:

• With The SEO Framework - Extension Manager's release, a celebratory discount has been introduced.
• If you wish to benefit from this lifetime discount, visit the shop for more information.
• More awesome extensions are coming soon!

Survey:

• After updating, please fill in our Update Survey: tell us what you like or can be done better.

For everyone: Tabbed In-post SEO layout

• This release brings tabbed layout to the in-post SEO settings.
• With this change I've also altered the overall looks, with the help from Daniel.
• This layout allows extensions from the Extension Manager to be implemented much easier.
• This layout is self-responsive! This means it's not dependent on the browser-size, but on how much content will fit.
• This layout therefore allows the SEO settings to be placed in the right sidebar! Take a look at the new screenshots.

For everyone: Browser support

• This release brings CSS Flexbox to the new in-post SEO settings metabox.
• The flexbox module is still experimental, in a way that not all browsers correctly support this to the fullest extend.
• However, support for as many browsers feasible has been implemented. Check out the list. Enjoy!
• The gist is that Chrome, Firefox, IE10 and Safari 6 or later are supported.

SEO Tip of the Update - Trust in layout

• Is your website glitchy and has placeholder images, unmatched colors or weirdly contrasting borders all over the place?
• Consider going for a more modern and clean layout. Strip out what isn't necessary. A clean layout implies professionalism and increases visitors' trust.
• Even if you're just starting out with your website, remove all that could be but really isn't. Because if you leave in placeholders for the future, it implies amateurism.
• People want their truth to be confirmed or their problems to be solved. If you can't confirm or solve the layout of your website, then they won't trust you to do so for their issues.
• Simply put: It doesn't have to be perfect, it just must be done.

Detailed log:

It is some miles, but it will shorten your journey tomorrow.

In the 2.8.0 update WordPress 4.3 and PHP 5.2 support have been dropped for better code quality.

• Incandescently Binate =

Release date:

• January 5th 2017

Did you know?

• The SEO Framework - Extension Manager has been published on WordPress.org.
• More extensions are coming soon! Stay tuned :)

Summarized:

• This update makes sure no conflicts arise anymore with WP Engine's staging services when WordPress is at a major version release.

Sorry, no SEO tip of the Update

Detailed log:

Remember, a changelog's details flows from our website.

• Semantic Structures =

Release date:

• June 14th 2016

Summarized

• Page builders are great for if you want to style your website, and when you want to do it fast.
• So from this update the Divi Builder, Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, and the Page Builder by SiteOrigin are now fully supported.
• Various bugs have also been fixed, to improve your experience. One particular bugfix is related to Polylang; this bugfix should improve performance and reduce other bugs from happening as well.
• The Automated and Manual description output has been improved in several ways as well.
• For developers, a class has been removed. All functions within have been moved to more suitable classes. This change will reduce server resource usage and increase overall performance.

SEO Tip of the Update - Know your Keywords:

• To know how your website is found, sign up for Google Search Console. Over a couple of days (or weeks), elegant data has been accumulated about your website.
• When you go to the Search Analytics within the Search Console, you'll see a list of queries people have used to find your website.
• The queries can be used as keywords, they are excellent starting points for new post titles and subjects. Go ahead, use them!

For developers - About the class removal:

• Because the plugin makes use of a "Facade pattern", all functions within the plugin are available at all times.
• In trade for increased resource usage this does make the plugin very compatible, faster, and easier to work with.
• This plugin serves one single responsibility: Outputting SEO data, and determining the reason why. Therefore, although it looks like a "God object", it's not.
• Please keep in mind that all functions from any class are available through the "Facade object". Because of this, the class removal shouldn't cause issues for developers.
• You can call this "Facade object" through a single cached function (rather than a global variable), this cached function is the_seo_framework().
• If you wish to extend this plugin, feel free to ask me for any details or suggestions at the Support forums.

Detailed Log:

There's something to be said about all these details.