Metando – Privacy-First SEO

Changelog

1.9.22 – 2026-10-31

• Docs: the plugin name, listing short description and readme now describe Metando as a privacy-first, lightweight SEO toolkit, and the built-in redirects/404 monitor and SEO-plugin import are surfaced in the feature list. No functional or behaviour change.

1.9.21 – 2026-10-20

• Code quality: the admin settings screens and the post SEO box now escape every generated control (icons, switches, meters, fields, health rows) on output through a shared wp_kses allowlist, following the escape-late guideline. No functional change.

1.9.20 – 2026-10-19

• Fix: redirect rules for URLs with accented or percent-encoded characters match reliably again (a 1.9.19 change could stop pre-existing rules matching).

1.9.19 – 2026-10-19

• Fix: a password-protected post’s body no longer leaks into its meta description, Open Graph tag, or structured data.
• Fix: redirect rules now match URLs that contain accented or percent-encoded characters.
• Fix: a custom sitemap URL that contains a query string is now written correctly in robots.txt.

1.9.18 – 2026-10-19

• Fix: title and description templates now keep every %%variable%% when saved. Previously a few, such as %%date%% and %%category%%, could lose characters.
• Fix: the guided setup and the settings import now reliably save their values.
• Fix: saving the general Settings screen no longer fails when social profile URLs are present.
• Fix: a redirect rule pointing to an external address now sends visitors there, instead of to the dashboard.
• Fix: post types, taxonomies, and author archives set to noindex are now also kept out of the XML sitemap.
• Admin: the Health and Overview screens no longer describe an update service; updates are delivered by WordPress.org.

1.9.17 – 2026-10-18

• Docs: the Plugin URI now points to the plugin’s live page at https://plugins.nettap.ca/metando. No functional change.

1.9.16 – 2026-10-17

• Internationalization: the text domain now matches the plugin slug on WordPress.org, so translated strings load correctly. No functional change.

1.9.15 – 2026-10-17

• Admin: the first-run setup prompt and the SEO-plugin conflict notice are now dismissible. No functional change.

1.9.14 – 2026-10-17

• Admin: added a Settings link to the plugins list row. No functional change.

1.9.13 – 2026-10-17

• Listed on WordPress.org as “Metando” so the plugin slug and text domain match. No functional change.

1.9.12 – 2026-10-17

• Code quality: the setup wizard’s default-image field is now sanitized directly with esc_url_raw (cleared the last Plugin Check input-sanitization warning). No functional change.

1.9.11 – 2026-10-17

• Code quality: cleared the remaining Plugin Check (VIP) findings – the settings importer no longer suppresses query filters, the importer and sitemap meta queries are documented as bounded and paginated, and unused update-server constants left over from the old updater were removed.

1.9.10 – 2026-10-17

• Code quality: cleared WordPress Plugin Check findings – added translators comments for every placeholder string, confirmed all admin output is escaped, sanitized form and server inputs, and documented the plugin’s own custom-table queries. No functional or behaviour change.

1.9.9 – 2026-10-17

• Updates now come through WordPress.org. Metando no longer includes its own update mechanism; the WordPress update system handles new versions. No settings or content are sent anywhere.

1.9.8 – 2026-10-16

• Developer: two new filters, metando_document_title and metando_meta_description, let a theme or plugin supply an authoritative title or meta description for known pages. Because og:title, twitter:title and the WebPage schema name follow the document title, and og:description and twitter:description follow the meta description, a single override keeps the whole page consistent.

1.9.7 – 2026-10-15

• Admin: the NETTAP plugins now cluster together as one group in the WordPress admin sidebar, so the whole suite sits in a single predictable place.

1.9.6 – 2026-10-14

• Admin: refreshed the Metando admin to the NETTAP house style – amber accents and buttons, icons on the Settings tabs, and refined stat tiles. No functional change.

1.9.5 – 2026-10-13

• Hardening: the settings import now validates the organization type and sanitizes the default image, custom sitemap and social profile URLs the same way the Settings form does, so a hand-edited or foreign import file cannot inject an arbitrary type or unsafe URL into the structured data.
• Fix: an invalid UTF-8 character can no longer drop the whole JSON-LD block; such characters are substituted instead.
• Fix: guard against a missing post when building the Article structured data.

1.9.4 – 2026-10-05

• Cleanup: replaced em and en dashes with hyphens in admin and front-end text to match the single-dash house style. No functional change.

1.9.3 – 2026-10-04

• Fix: JSON-LD values now carry literal text. HTML entities in titles (for example “&” for an ampersand) are decoded before output, so structured data holds real characters. Which nodes are emitted is unchanged.

1.9.2 – 2026-10-04

• New: a metando_schema_graph filter lets a companion plugin add or adjust JSON-LD nodes inside Metando’s single @graph, so typed entities (for example LocalBusiness, Event, Article) and Metando’s page graph ship as one block with no duplicate schema. Default output is unchanged.

1.9.1 – 2026-10-04

• Docs: added a Screenshots section; Tested up to 7.1.
• Internal: added an automated test suite covering the snippet-variable engine, meta templating, robots/canonical logic and importer mapping; no functional changes.

1.9.0

• Redesigned the per-page SEO box into four clear sections – Search, Social, Visibility and Advanced – with a quick-jump tab bar, in the NETTAP admin style.
• Live Google snippet preview and a social share-card preview that update as you type.
• Length meters on the search title and description (empty, short, good, too long) and an at-a-glance SEO score.
• Visibility controls are now plain-English switches (show in search results, follow links, allow cached copies) with the technical term shown alongside. Stored values and robots output are unchanged.

1.8.0

• Default social image can now be chosen from the media library (not just a pasted URL), in Settings and the setup wizard.
• Use your own sitemap: enter a custom sitemap URL and Metando points search engines to it in robots.txt instead of the WordPress one.

1.7.1

• Fixed “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page” when opening the first-run setup screen.

1.7.0

• Guided first-run setup: a one-screen wizard with smart defaults gets a new site search-ready in about a minute. Skip any time.
• Search-engine verification: add Google, Bing, Pinterest and Yandex verification codes (paste the code or the whole meta tag) and Metando outputs the homepage tags.
• robots.txt rules: append your own rules to the WordPress virtual robots.txt from Settings > Technical.

1.6.1

• Moved the Health screen to the bottom of the Metando admin menu for consistency across the NETTAP plugins.

1.6.0

• Automatic redirects: when a published post or page changes its URL, Metando adds a 301 from the old address to the new one, and can return 410 Gone when published content is trashed or deleted. Restoring from trash removes the 410.
• Settings transfer: export your Metando configuration (templates, identity, indexing, breadcrumbs and redirect rules) to a JSON file and import it on another site. No per-page content and no secrets are included.
• Image alt-text audit: the dashboard now reports images missing alt text, with a per-page breakdown and a site-wide count.

1.5.0

• Import tool: bring titles, descriptions, canonicals, indexing and social metadata over from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, or SEOPress, including per-content-type templates. Nothing is removed from the other plugin, and existing Metando values are kept unless you choose to overwrite.
• Redirect manager with a 404 monitor: add 301/302/307/410 rules, see hit counts, and turn any logged 404 into a redirect. All local – no external requests.
• Indexing controls: noindex whole content types, taxonomies, author or date archives site-wide; per-page noindex now joined by nofollow and noarchive.
• Breadcrumbs: a [metando_breadcrumbs] shortcode plus BreadcrumbList structured data, with a per-post primary-category picker that also feeds the %%category%% variable.
• Richer social + identity: per-page social image with a media picker, article published/modified times, og:locale, social-profile sameAs links, and optional LocalBusiness structured data (name, address, phone).
• The settings and import screens now stay available even when another SEO plugin is active, so you can import before switching.

1.4.0

• New snippet-variable engine: titles and descriptions are built from templates using %%title%%, %%excerpt%%, %%category%%, %%sitename%%, %%sep%% and more. Empty variables and the separators they leave behind are cleaned up automatically.
• Meta descriptions are now pulled automatically from each page (template, then excerpt, then a content summary), with a per-page field to rewrite them when you want.
• Per-content-type title and description templates on a new Content types settings tab; posts, pages and custom post types can each have their own.
• Automatic descriptions can be turned off site-wide.
• Editor snippet preview rebuilt: live Google-style title/description/URL preview with character guidance, reflecting your templates and overrides as you type.
• Titles and descriptions now resolve for category, tag, custom taxonomy and author archives as well as posts and pages.

1.3.1

• Updated the generated-description suggestion and search preview while authors edit draft content.
• Added an Add a title placeholder for untitled drafts.

1.3.0

• Added a search-result preview and one-click generated description suggestion in the page editor.
• Reused one local excerpt/content description generator for the editor preview and front-end output.

1.2.2

• Fixed the XML Sitemap screen’s availability badge to use WordPress core’s sitemap server status.

1.2.1

• Added the short /sitemap.xml alias to the WordPress core sitemap index and advertised it in virtual robots.txt.

1.2.0

• Added Metando > Health with environment, search visibility, core sitemap, and rewrite-route diagnostics.
• Fixed sitemap status detection to use the WordPress core sitemap server method.
• Refresh core rewrite rules once on upgrade so WordPress sitemap routes are registered.

1.1.1

• Clarified that custom canonical overrides, as well as noindex pages, stay out of the core post sitemap.

1.1.0

• Added native XML sitemap controls for public post types, taxonomies, and per-file URL limits.
• Kept noindex and alternate-canonical pages out of the sitemap before XML rendering.
• Added anonymous signed updates through the NETTAP License Server with package hash verification.

1.0.0

• Initial release: page metadata, social previews, canonical/noindex controls, structured data, native sitemap filtering, and local content review.