The SEO Framework – Fast, Automated, Effortless.

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5.2.0 – Complete

Pray take care, Glaucon, that your daring ambition doesn’t lead to a fall! Don’t you see how risky it is to say or do what you don’t understand? – Xenophon

Release highlights

• Authors now have complete SEO controls: a meta title and description, social tags, a canonical URL, robots directives, and a redirect.
• You can now click a generated title or description and edit it directly, instead of retyping it from scratch.
• We added Fediverse support, so Mastodon can credit the author when someone shares your page.
• Breadcrumb settings now let you pick the taxonomy for each post type and omit the post type archive.
• The breadcrumb shortcode can now omit the Home crumb and collapse long trails with its new max attribute.
• The optimized sitemap now has a CSS stylesheet, so it stays readable when browsers stop applying XSLT.
• TranslatePress sites now get a sitemap for each language, and Polylang and WPML now advertise working sitemap URLs in robots.txt.
• You can now add a TikTok profile in the Schema.org settings.
• You can now enter a Facebook domain verification code in the Webmaster settings.
• Pages built with Bricks now get a generated description from their text.
• We fixed many edge-case issues and corrected inaccurate or outdated PHP and JavaScript documentation throughout the plugin.

Complete

After the “Profound” v5.1 update, we’re proud to present TSF v5.2 “Complete.” Posts, pages, custom post types, terms, and post type archives each had their own SEO controls for years. Authors never did: they only got Facebook and X profile fields, and everything else came from your global settings.

That ends now. Every kind of content you edit in the WordPress dashboard now carries its own SEO settings: posts, pages, terms, and users. Every author archive can be tuned, indexed, redirected, and inspected like any other page. We named this update “Complete” because it closes the last gap in the way TSF handles your content.

We didn’t stop there. This update also brings a long-requested way to edit generated values, Mastodon support, and a sitemap that survives the end of XSLT.

SEO for every author

Each user’s profile page now has General, Social, and Visibility settings for their author archive, next to the existing Authorial Info fields:

• General: meta title and meta description fields, and a “Remove the site title?” checkbox.
• Social: Open Graph title and description fields, Twitter Card title, description, and card type fields, and a social image field.
• Authorial Info: Facebook, Fediverse (new), and X profile fields.
• Visibility: canonical URL, robots indexing, link following, archiving, and 301 redirect fields.

Those values apply to that author’s archive. On an author archive, twitter:creator and fediverse:creator use the author’s X handle and Fediverse profile when you’ve set them. We store these fields once per user, including on Multisite, the same way we already stored Authorial Info.

The WordPress users sitemap listens to these settings. An author you set to noindex or to redirect leaves the sitemap, and an author you set to index stays listed, even when you set all author archives to noindex. The sitemap still lists only authors who have published posts. It also returns a 404 error when no author is indexable.

The SEO Bar comes along. The users list now shows it, and profile pages show it, too. A user who can’t edit posts isn’t a public author, so the SEO Bar shows only the indexing item for them.

Edit generated values directly

TSF fills empty title and description fields with a blurred placeholder showing what it generates. Until now, you had to retype that text from scratch to change a word. Now, click the empty field and the placeholder stays, with your cursor where you clicked. Start typing and the text becomes normal text you can edit. Clear the field and the placeholder returns.

New sites have this enabled by default. Existing sites keep the previous behavior until you enable “Edit generated values directly?” at SEO Settings > General Settings > Layout, under Editing Settings.

Fediverse support

Mastodon can credit an author when someone shares your page, provided your page says who wrote it. We added the fediverse:creator meta tag and rel=me profile links for that, so Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms can credit and verify the profile.

You set a site profile and an author fallback at SEO Settings > Social Meta Settings, and each author can override that fallback on their own profile page. Each profile has a handle and a profile URL. Enter the @username@domain handle from Mastodon’s Author attribution, or paste a profile URL to fill both fields. TSF also adds the author’s Fediverse profile to the Schema.org sameAs links.

Our Fediverse creator and Mastodon article walks through setting up the credit and the green checkmark.

Breadcrumb settings

Two new settings at SEO Settings > Schema.org Settings change your breadcrumbs, and one cleanup applies automatically:

• Choose the taxonomy: singular breadcrumbs can use a chosen taxonomy for each post type. The default keeps the current trail, so products keep using Brands until you select Product categories. “Exclude taxonomy crumb” removes the term trail.
• Omit the archive: singular breadcrumbs can omit the post type archive. For products, that archive is the shop page.
• Cleaner names: breadcrumbs no longer prefix archive names, such as “Category:”, “Archives:”, or “Author:”. This affects structured data and the shortcode alike, and the trail skips parent pages that visitors can’t view.

Until you change the new settings, singular trails keep following the previous taxonomy and archive crumbs.

Breadcrumb shortcode

The breadcrumb shortcode changed, too:

• Shorter trails: the new max attribute collapses a longer trail. A max below 3 is treated as 3.
• No Home crumb: the shortcode now omits the Home crumb when its home attribute is empty.
• Whole crumbs: crumbs now wrap as a whole instead of breaking mid-word.

Read the breadcrumb shortcode article for the details.

A sitemap that survives XSLT

Major browsers will soon no longer apply XSLT by default. That means the styled, readable version of your optimized sitemap would turn into plain, unstyled XML. We ported the styling to CSS, so browsers that no longer apply XSLT still show a styled sitemap. As long as browsers still apply XSLT, the XSL view stays the preferred way to display it.

The CSS view has presentation and usability differences, but none of them affect the XML output. URLs aren’t clickable, the title and logo don’t link to the homepage, and the browser tab has no document title. Our sitemap styling article lists them all.

Sitemaps for every language

Multilingual sites got a lot of attention:

• TranslatePress: each published language that has a language directory now gets its own sitemap, and robots.txt lists every language except the one served without a directory.
• Polylang and WPML: robots.txt now advertises sitemap URLs that work. Before, the URLs could include the language directory twice, or the static front-page slug, so they returned a 404 error or redirected to WordPress’s sitemap.
• Cache clearing: clearing the sitemap cache now clears every language, including when your site uses a persistent object cache.
• Translated sitemap links: SEO Settings now lists the language sitemaps under “View translated sitemaps,” using the language name as the link text.

Our translation plugin compatibility article has the URL formats.

Facebook’s real language list

Facebook doesn’t document which languages it supports for Open Graph. So, we scraped their network and tested all 46500 possible locale combinations. TSF now drops 39 locales that Facebook doesn’t support, and adds three that it does: Haitian Creole, Inupiaq, and Inuktitut. For example, Spanish (Mexico) now falls back to Spanish (Spain). This affects only the Open Graph locale output, not your site’s language.

Even more

• TikTok: you can now add a TikTok profile at SEO Settings > Schema.org Settings. TSF includes it in your site’s Schema.org sameAs links.
• Facebook verification: you can now enter a Facebook domain verification code at SEO Settings > Webmaster Meta Settings, under Webmaster Integration Settings. Thanks, Contributolo!
• Bricks: a page edited with Bricks now gets a generated description from the text in its Text and Section elements.
• Twitter Card labels: “Twitter Title” is now “Twitter Card Title,” and “Twitter Description” is now “Twitter Card Description.”
• Feeds: posts you exclude from on-site archive listings are now also omitted from the feed.

Edge cases, hunted down

We fixed many edge-case issues. For example, a backslash in a post or term SEO field no longer disappears on every save. Saving a post through the REST API or WP-CLI now refreshes the sitemap. A homepage title or description of 0 is no longer treated as empty. The detailed log linked below lists the rest.

We also corrected inaccurate or outdated PHP and JavaScript documentation throughout the plugin.

It has been a slow year for releases: over 10 months without an update. Behind the scenes, we spent months experimenting with and refining our development workflow. AI-assisted review helped us uncover issues, but Sybre personally verified every single letter written for this update.

We also built and published open-source tools:

• wp-plugin-regression runs WordPress Playground sites and compares plugin output before and after changes.
• makepot-tsf generates translation templates using WP-CLI’s internationalization tools, without requiring a WordPress installation.

We published the accompanying AI workflows for regression testing and translation template generation, too. Our expanded coding instructions guide AI assistants toward the conventions we use throughout TSF.

We can now build features we previously considered too costly to maintain. Bricks description generation and TranslatePress sitemap support are two results. There’s a lot more to come.

Clear your cache

We’ve updated the plugin’s CSS and JavaScript files. If you find issues with the interface, you may need to flush your browser caches. Check out our updated KB article to learn more.

If your cache plugin has no exclusion rules for sitemap endpoints, it could serve an empty sitemap or sitemap stylesheet on later visits. TSF now tells cache plugins that honor DONOTCACHEPAGE not to store those responses. That can’t remove an empty response your cache already stored, so run your cache plugin’s “Purge All,” “Clear all cache,” or equivalent action after updating.

Support the development

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

If this update saved you time, you can also sponsor our work on GitHub. Sponsorship helps fund development without adding nags or upsells.

Detailed log

To hit on something right by luck without search I call good luck, to do something well after study and practice I call doing well; and those who pursue this seem to me to do well.

Full changelog

• You can find the full changelog here.