Please Move Setting Page Back Under Standard WordPress "Settings"

Bernhard:
We’re very interested in fixing bugs.
Can you be specific about the bugs you’re referring to?

@michael T – yeah man doesn’t matter how much blood, sweat, tears and years you put into it, how awesome your plugin is, how much folks have benefited from your AWESOME plugin, including myself – you will always have a handful of folks nickel and dime you to death. I think the old ancient philosophy about not using Top Level menus is well…ancient and outdated. Out with the old and in with the new I always say.

Keep on rockin it man! All in One SEO kicks A$$! Thank you.

@michael Torbert: I’ll admit that my “hubris” and “d-bag” comments were harsh and uncalled for and I apologize for them. I have to say though that the changes in menu placement that you made to your plugin that you “spent over 5 years developing and supporting” also broke two WordPress Multisite sites that I’ve run for clients for years. It created headaches for me and expense for them. Obviously plugin changes are to be expected and can break sites from time to time. At the same time, as I’m sure you know well, WordPress’ design “standards” help to prevent these things from happening. So moving your plugin’s UI to the top menu was confusing to the users, broke code design to manage and simplify the menus and was generally unnecessary since most of those settings would be accessed infrequently. Not to mention, this change was not clearly stated in the change log for v2.0. I appreciate that you have developed a popular plugin and want to do so in your own way but making a change like this (which seems inconsequential) has repercussions for your users.

@asocalguy

A better course of action would have been to have submitted a bug report with the specifics of the issue you’re seeing.
We’ve tested on multisite, and have many multisite users. This is the first I’m hearing of any issues. It sounds like you’ve made some customizations to the menu that have a conflict with AIOSEOP.
Either way, let us know exactly what’s going on and I’ll fix any bugs.

Thanks for your reply, Michael. It’s not a bug, per se, so we didn’t report it as such. We have custom code that (among other things) controls what options show up to the end users by altering the array of Settings menu items. When AIOSEOP moved, this code broke and the end users started tinkering, asking questions, etc. in addition to it causing a few other things to not work. I won’t go into details because it’s not a bug; it works as you expect it to.

My main issue is the fact that AIOSEOP went from (appropriately) being another plugin in the Settings menu to being the most prominent item in the menu after the Dashboard (even more prominent than core features people use every day!) and also/redundantly on the admin menu across the top of the window. This makes no sense to me as the three options under this menu will probably be used rarely once they are tuned and could have easily been handled as tabs within your settings page. It would have made much more sense to leave AIOSEOP under the Settings menu and give the user the option to promote it to the top level if they wanted it there. There’s no way to know for certain, of course, but I would bet NO ONE would choose to move your menu item to the top level if they had been given that choice.

Frankly, the only way the move makes sense to me is if it’s an attempt to get your Hostgator and Headway Themes affiliate banners in front of more users and promote more donations and Amazon Wishlist purchases and that doesn’t really seem to fit the WordPress ethos.