Possible to only add Open Graph Meta and Hatom?

Hello!

Yes, TSF supports Open Graph out of the box.

It does automatically override your titles–you can adjust its behavior via settings, and even disable all title-adjustments via filters.

hAtom is an inline and dated form of adding structured data. We use the newer, more robust, and more widely adopted standard “Schema.org” via JSON-LD scripts instead. Here’s an overview of the structured data types we support. hAtom can run alongside that, might you still want to support that via other means.

Hello again 🙂

Title adjustment filter
Most filters aren’t listed in our KB, because it’s extraordinarily time-consuming to maintain them. So, it’s best to dive into the code to inspect everything in great detail. I documented everything in the code.

In any case, this is the filter you’re looking for. You can place it in your (child-)theme’s functions.php file or a custom (mu-)plugin.

add_filter( 'the_seo_framework_overwrite_titles', '__return_false' );

Please note that this filter won’t hide the title options and fields. I’m considering implementing a setting that’ll take care of everything, but it’s not planned yet. I’m reticent because since as far as I can recall, only one other person has asked for this.

Query alteration settings
The query alteration settings are unique to The SEO Framework. If you notice a performance hit on your site when using The SEO Framework, these options can help you alleviate them. Otherwise, I don’t recommend adjusting them.

The issue is that when you remove a page from archives or search with The SEO Framework, the query adjustments can make caching mechanisms more strained on the database level–not a level after that (such as (Varnish) object caching). However, I don’t expect issues when fewer than 20,000 posts are on your site. Only news publishers have asked for these settings.

Your caching setup may interfere with the exclusion settings, in that archives aren’t updated as soon as you exclude a post from visibility. However, the caching mechanism itself shouldn’t be affected. A cache flush should resolve issues; may they arrive.

Lastly, we haven’t received any complaints about performance since TSF v3.0.0, thanks to this adjustment.

Hello!

There’s no penalty. TSF follows the same title-output design pattern as WordPress does, so there shouldn’t be a significant change. You simply gain more control over it via the various input methods.

The SEO Bar will notify you of titles that do not follow Google’s guidelines. Aside from one: repeated/boilerplate titles–we can’t reliably detect those.

And yes, deactivating the plugin will leave your website as it was before it was activated. The plugin is dynamic in this sense–it won’t leave any visible traces, aside from some plugin-specific database entries. It is one of the reasons why we still don’t display breadcrumbs.