Our WordPress SEO plugin has been getting more and more downloads, bringing it to the top of the most downloaded plugin chart on WordPress.org fairly regularly. With that comes more interest from other developers as well, which is something we absolutely love, but is kind of impossible to manage properly on WordPress.org. Which is why we’ve now decided to fully move to Github.
New developer
Recently there were some unfortunate events in the US which caused BlueGlass, a company lots of my friends worked at, to go bust. As with all negatives, there was a good thing that came out of this, as I was able to hire Linh Pham, one of their incredible developers. He’s now come on board full time as a remote worker to fix bugs and develop new functionality across all our free and premium plugins. You’ll probably see him on github if you decide to become active there.
Roadmap
I have many, many ideas for WordPress SEO. I’m slowly speccing these ideas as Issues in github, where you will currently find an 1.6 milestone and a 2.0 milestone. WordPress SEO 1.6 will contain a lot of bugfixes and some smaller enhancements, combined with one bigger new feature: a wpseo_sitemap shortcode that generates an HTML sitemap.
The 2.0 branch already contains a first stab at Google Webmaster Tools integration, allowing for:
- Easy website verification.
- Verified submission of the XML index sitemap.
- Retrieval of crawl errors.
I’m very excited about the potential of that new feature.
Internationalization
This is probably a good time to remind you that if you want to become active in the internationalization of the WordPress SEO plugin, we have a fully functioning GlotPress install on translate.yoast.com. You can register here if you want to help translate. The internationalization for all our plugins, both free and premium is managed by the awesome Remkus de Vries. We currently have 382 registered translators, of which more than half have actually been active in translating, but we can always use more active translators.
As a thank you, for our premium plugins you can get a free single license of a plugin if you translate the plugin into a new language.
Patches welcome!
I have taken the freedom to look at how the Easy Digital Downloads github community is set up and basically copied, pasted and modified some of what they did, resulting in most notably our new contribution guide. But what I really want to say is, we really welcome your pull requests!
I’m very excited about this change and hope it means more people will dive in and help us improve what’s already the most advanced WordPress SEO plugin available today!
WordPress SEO Community & Roadmap is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - The Art & Science of Website Optimization. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!