Yoast have updated their SEO plugin

ghoush,

Goodness, yes they did. I’ll have Requirements Checklist updated within the next few days. It will include fallback support for older versions going back one year.

Thanks for the heads-up!!

In the meantime, you might want to roll back to the last Yoast update before 3.0, to retain functionality for your users.

I’ll post back here once my update has been pushed.

Cheers!
-D

ghoush,

Well, I have some bad news here. It seems the 3.0 Yoast update wasn’t very well tested and broke much of the functionality in their plugin. There has been an outcry among long time users, and many users have already chosen to switch plugins.

How does this affect our situation? It tells me that Yoast will probably see another update in the near future that brings back some of the original functionality. I’m all for updating code to make this plugin work again. But, I’m more for future-proofing my own plugin. In other words, if I need to support other plugins that are broken, my plugin will become messy, unreliable and difficult to maintain. Until Yoast figures out their problems, my plugin will only support working versions of it.

So, I highly suggest you roll back to the last Yoast version before their 3.0 release. I know its not ideal, but its what I need to do to maintain my own codebase. If you absolutely need to use Yoast 3.0 or later, I am available for custom work at an hourly rate.

I Hope you understand my position on this. Let me know if you agree.

-D

ghoush,

Actually, I’ve looked into it some more and it turns out, my plugin does seem to be working with the new version of Yoast SEO (3.0.3).

The input fields have changed in Yoast (now, they’re using hidden fields to contain input values, rather than visible ones). But, those fields hidden fields have the same ID’s as the visible ones did, and I’m not running into an issue.

What has changed is that the default value for the description box (the one added automatically based on WYSIWYG content) is not contained in the new hidden field, but only in the visible one. So, if you use my plugin to require a meta description, the user must enter a custom meta description. That is confusing for users, but I feel its an issue with Yoast’s UI, more than my own. Nonetheless, I will update my plugin to fix that issue. Until then, you might want to uncheck the meta description box in my plugin.

I am interested to hear your thoughts.

I’m also wondering if adding an option to require a good SEO score (a green traffic light, if you will) would be more beneficial than individual settings for fields. I do know of people (myself included) who don’t necessarily aim for a green light every time. But, that is what seems to set Yoast SEO apart from the others. Please share your thoughs.

And, my apologies for all the replies – this is a confusing issue report.

-D

Thanks for all of that, great responses.

There are over a million installed users of Yoast. I have no idea how many are upgraded to 3, and how many are actually having problems. But so far we aren’t having any of the major reported problems. And with only a couple hundred complaints in any given place I am guessing a fair amount of others aren’t having any problems either. So I see no need to roll back to the 2.x series. Maybe we are just lucky.

You are right, on the description if we hit the edit button and then re-paste in what was already there it magically works. That is definitely on them, for the interface change, its clumsy.

Good point about a million users to a couple hundred complaints. I’m sure more than that have been affected, though. And, most of them have probably dealt so in silence. I did write a review of their new version, but I hardly ever do so – usually easier to just move on and choose another option.

Their interface change is clumsy. And, I’m sure they’ll fix it at some point. Hopefully, you don’t have too many posts (it could take forever to copy/paste that description on every page). I manage some sites with thousands of posts (magazine/ news sites) and the thought of manually fixing that problem seems daunting. If that’s your case, rolling back might be a good temp solution. Otherwise, roll on!

Thanks again for the issue report… I’ll keep an eye on Yoast as they move forward on this.

-D

marking as resolved