Lacks Critical Integration for JetEngine CPT Archives & Custom Tables

While Squirrly SEO claims compatibility with JetEngine, this integration is superficial and fails in professional, developer-focused use cases. The core issue lies in how Squirrly accesses custom field data versus how JetEngine can store it.

Squirrly’s custom field pattern feature ({{customfield()}}) functions by reading data exclusively from the standard wp_postmeta table. This works for simple setups. However, JetEngine offers a critical performance feature for developers: the ability to store meta fields in separate, custom database tables.

When a developer uses this advanced JetEngine configuration, Squirrly becomes completely unable to access the custom field data. This makes it impossible to dynamically populate meta titles, descriptions, or schema for CPTs or their archives if they rely on fields stored in custom tables. The SEO automation workflow breaks down entirely.

This limitation is particularly severe for CPT archives. A common development pattern is to use a JetEngine Options Page to control the SEO metadata for an archive page. If these options are stored in a custom table, Squirrly cannot read them, forcing manual data entry and defeating the purpose of dynamic SEO.

Other SEO plugins, like Rank Math or SEOPress, provide documented hooks and deeper integration to handle this exact scenario. Squirrly’s documentation provides no acknowledgment of this limitation and no developer-focused solution (filters, hooks, etc.) to work around it.

“JetEngine compatibility” is limited to sitemaps and CPTs that use default wp_postmeta storage. For any advanced JetEngine implementation that leverages custom meta tables for performance, Squirrly SEO is not a viable option. This lack of deep, structural integration is a significant drawback for developers building complex WordPress sites.

• This topic was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by Francesco.