WordPress SEO now in public beta

I’ll be honest. I had not expected so many of my newsletter readers to start testing, but I’m deeply thankful that they (you) did. All your testing and your reports towards me allowed me to squash many many bugs, documentation inconsistencies and more over the last three days, resulting in one of the biggest changelogs I’ve ever written for a single release.

I’ve taken the time tonight to give the plugin a true home: it now has a page on yoast.com: WordPress SEO plugin, with a feature list and subpages for the three modules it’ll have.

WordPress.org

I’ve also just pulled the trigger and uploaded the plugin to WordPress.org, you can find it here. There are no stable versions yet, so auto update probably won’t work yet, but you can download the latest version from the WordPress.org plugin repository now.

You can of course, if you like it, also rate it with 5 stars, I wouldn’t mind you doing that at all, as you can imagine.

The fact that it’s now on WordPress.org also means I now have support forums there. Some of you had already started using those, and I’ll be using them to take feedback from you, although you’re still very welcome to email me as well. Changelogs will also be made for each update, and you’ll always find them here. That page contains the changelog between the first beta and the current one too, have a read if you want, it’s huge.

Modules

So there are a couple of things I owe you, as loyal readers, an explanation on. First of all, this module thing. The plugin allows for modules to be loaded that add functionality to the plugin. I currently have three of these planned:

• News SEO
• Video SEO
• Local SEO

The News SEO module, which is already in the download you can currently get from WordPress.org, is and will remain free. It allows generation of an XML News Sitemap, which you’ll need if you want to be included in Google News. More features will be added to that later.

The other two modules will be paid modules; they serve a more niche market and will require quite a bit of work to get right, hence the need for them to be paid. All three modules are developed by me in partnership with a subject matter expert, what they’ll do and who these guys are is outlined on the pages above. Trust me, they’re the best in the business.

Beta period

Second: this plugin is STILL in beta. It will probably remain in beta for at least another 2 weeks, maybe more. Your testing is very much appreciated and will remain to be very much appreciated. Whether you’re sending me technical things that don’t work or lines of text you don’t understand or could be improved: it’s all great.

Integration

I’m happy to say that Scribe SEO has been updated to work well with WordPress SEO, and the needed adaptions have been made to make it work well with Genesis too. The same work is underway for Thesis, and I’ve also been talking to the WPML team to make sure the WordPress SEO plugin is fully compatible with WPML as well.

Lastly, Nathan Rice of StudioPress has been so kind to promise to update his SEO Data Transporter plugin soon to work with the plugin too, so you can easily move data back and forth between this plugin and other SEO plugins, should you ever want to switch away from this one…

This is a very exciting time for me, and I’m very thankful for the help that everyone has provided so far, let’s make this a great success together!