Hi there!
I’m glad you’re starting to like the plugin!
Yes, it’s intentional.
The plugin can’t parse all widgets outputted by Elementor, and some widgets can be protected from public view. So, precautionarily, it disables the automated description feature when it detects the page is set up with Elementor.
On the positive side, Google is also able to generate descriptions for you; however, it’s always best to enter one yourself.
Thanks for your reply, it sounds reasonable.
For now it’s sufficient for me to know, that I have to write down the description for Elementor pages on my own, instead of expectiong it’s done automatically.
For the future – are there any chances you’ll try to improve your parsing to include Elementor or other page builders? At least in some partial way, for example parsing only text and headings widgets?
I know it’s allways the best practise to write the decription yourself, but sometimes it’s hard to explain it to the clients and in this cases the description stays empty.
I just dove into the code, and there seems to be a standard way of determining if the content is publicly parsable: render_plain_content, as seen here. However, I don’t know if pulling content from Elementor is a straightforward task; let alone the performance impact it brings as we check each widget.
The SEO Framework, as of v3.1.0, doesn’t emit warnings when no description is generated. So, I don’t think your clients should be too worried :). Moreover, descriptions aren’t a ranking factor anymore; the fields only give some control over what’s displayed in the search engines.
In any case, I’ve opened a feature request:
https://github.com/sybrew/the-seo-framework/issues/380
