I’ve just released a new update for Meta Tag Manager, a complete rewrite and bump up to version 2.0.
This was my first ever plugin to be submitted to the WordPress repository over 7 years ago! Back in the day, there weren’t any (or none I found) plugins that would allow you to add meta tags to your site. This was somewhat a pain for me whenever I needed to add google or yahoo verification meta tags to connect to their webmaster tools. Sure, you can edit the theme header, but that presented problems when updating the theme and was also just less convenient overall.
Over the years, other plugins came out that served my purposes, and in other cases I just verified my sites over DNS. As other plugins took up more of my time, this one fell by the wayside, and it has been four years since my last update!
However, I still get people asking me every so often whether I can update it. There’s also a surprisingly large number of active installs, so I felt it only fitting for my first ever (publicly released) WordPress plugin to get a spruce up. Moreover, it’s a refreshing change of pace to work on a plugin that is less complex than some of my popular ones.
The main aim of this first rewrite was to:
- Get it up to latest coding standards of WordPress, which includes security best practices and getting rid of outdated PHP methods causing warnings.
- Keep it lightweight
- Improve the UI for creating meta tags, which restricted the creation of tags with only the name property.
- Allow for limiting these tags to show on certain page types (CPTs, Taxonomies for now) along with the option to show on all pages or just the home page as before.
- Allow for adding specific meta tags to Custom Post Types
Additionally, I’ve integrated the Freemius Insights service to make use of their feedback data collection features and allow the users to optionally share some usage stats, which will hopefully make our plugin better.
I’m curious to see how useful people find the plugin, and certainly intend on at very least maintaining these features, ensuring they work with newer updates.
Other possible plans/ideas for this plugin are:
- Allow Taxonomy-specific meta tags.
- Add placeholders for global meta tags, allowing insertion of dynamic data
- Making it easier to set up Open Graph and Twitter meta data.
- Multi-lingual support
- Make it extendable through hooks/filters to allow other devs to add their own.
There’s already plenty to go on for now, but I’m open to ideas and may well tackle other features if they’re in demand. Feel free to let me know!