Inherit Featured and Custom Meta Images from Parents

Does your website use parent pages and/or categories? Unless you have a very simple site, you’ve probably organized your WordPress pages and categories as parents with child pages / categories.

And have you defined a featured image for a parent page and wished its children used the same featured image automatically?

How about social and search optimization images? If you’re using the WPSSO Core plugin — and have selected a custom image for Facebook, Google, Twitter, and/or Pinterest — would you like the children of that page and/or category to inherit those custom images automatically?

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WordPress.org Hides Plugin Deprecation from Users

It’s official, as I’ve just learned from Mika (aka Ipstenu) and Samuel (aka Otto) — WordPress.org will remove the description and assets from all known deprecated plugins, so users landing on the plugin’s page will be told that “This plugin has been closed for new installs” and nothing else, leaving users to wonder what happened, why the plugin is closed, and what they should do next.

I’m a strong proponent of letting users know why a plugin is deprecated, but Mika and Samuel have taken a hard-line against this, and have told me that all known deprecated plugins will be closed (except for exceptions — see below).

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Monitor and Fix Incorrectly Coded Content Filters

I’ve just released version 1.1.0 of JSM’s Block Filter Output – a new plugin to monitor the content filter and fix incorrectly coded filter hooks (that send text to the webpage instead of returning it, as all filter hooks must).

A notice is also sent to the PHP error log when webpage output is detected:

[01-Oct-2017 01:48:28 UTC] Block Filter Output: The “ClassName::echoText” filter hook with priority 10 in the “the_content” filter has mistakenly provided some webpage output. All WordPress filter hooks must return their text – not send it to the webpage output. Please contact the author of that filter hook and report this issue as a coding error / bug. Incorrect webpage output:
—BEGIN—
<strong>Some output that should have been returned instead of echo’ed.</strong>
—END—

The plugin is fully tested and compatible with PHP v7.x (PHP v5.3 or better required).

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New Plugin – WPSSO Ratings and Reviews

A new WPSSO Ratings and Reviews (WPSSO RAR) extension for WPSSO has been released. This Free plugin extends the WordPress comment system with a new star rating and review feature — ratings and reviews can be enabled / disabled per post, new reviews are labeled as reviews (not comments), a star rating can be required before reviews are accepted, replies to reviews are properly labeled as replies / comments, and the colors of star ratings can be customized from the settings page.

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New Plugin – WPSSO User Locale Selector

A new WPSSO User Locale Selector (WPSSO UL) extension for WPSSO and WordPress version 4.7+ has been released. This Free extension provides a user locale / language / region selector in the WordPress admin back-end and front-end toolbar menus. This allows users to easily change their preferred locale setting from the toolbar instead of having to update their WordPress profile page.

The default WordPress behavior is to apply the user locale preference to the admin back-end only — this plugin can optionally extend the user locale preference to the front-end webpage as well (enabled by default in the SSO > User Locale settings page).

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New Plugin – JSM’s Force SSL / HTTPS

When searching for a plugin on WordPress.org, I’m always surprised by the number of results — many plugins appear to be similar, or even identical, but if you look at their PHP code, those similarities quickly evaporate. This was the case recently when I was looking for a simple plugin to redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS. Some plugins were way too basic / incomplete in their logic, while others looked like a pile of spaghetti code with the kitchen sink thrown in there somewhere. :)

JSM’s Force SSL / HTTPS is my take on a simple WordPress plugin to redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS. ;-)

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New Plugin – WPSSO Strip Schema Microdata

If you’re using the WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup (WPSSO JSON) extension (and if not, you really should), you may have noticed that Google’s Schema validation tools can pickup additional incomplete / inaccurate Schema markup from your theme templates. WPSSO JSON defines its JSON-LD markup as the “main entity” for the webpage — so Google will prefer this markup over any other found in the webpage — but you may still want to cleanup that incomplete / inaccurate Schema Microdata from your theme templates. The new WPSSO Strip Schema Microdata (WPSSO SSM) extension is a Free plugin that removes Schema Microdata markup from the webpage body section automatically, leaving the Schema JSON-LD markup as the only Schema markup in the webpage.

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New Plugin – JSM’s Show Post Meta

Wondering about the post meta your theme and/or plugins might be creating?

Want to find the name of a specific post meta key?

Need some help debugging your post meta?

The JSM’s Show Post Meta plugin displays all post meta (aka custom fields) keys and their unserialized values in a metabox at the bottom of post editing pages.

There are no plugin settings — simply install and activate the plugin.

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