DragonByte SEO v1.0.0 Open Beta 9 Released!

[Fillip H.]

Hey all,

DragonByte SEO v1.0.0 Beta 9 has been released! This release adds multiple new features as well as fixing nearly two dozen bugs as reported by our testers.

Persistent SEO Titles lets you reduce the amount of processing required to translate a friendly URL back to its original vB URL. The first time someone loads a friendly URL in their browser and DBSEO resolves it, it will store the result in the database and speed up all future page loads of the same URL. You are also able to turn this setting off in the settings.

Content-Aware SEO Titles discards the content's own title and instead builds a new title based on keywords you define. This means if someone posts a question titled "Question", your SEO'd title won't just be "question". Keywords can be defined with 3 different priority tiers (Low/Medium/High) that will be used if they are found in either a thread's first post, a blog entry or a CMS entry. This feature is disabled by default and can be enabled for Threads, Blogs and CMS Entries separately.

Custom Sitemap URLs allows you to add a single custom page, or import a list of custom pages, to be included in the sitemap. You are able to set default Update Frequency, Priority Range and Last Update date for imported URLs, with a search & browse function that will let you edit/delete custom URLs from the sitemap.


Below is the complete changelog for this version.


New Features Added

Persistent SEO Titles

• Store SEO'd titles in a database table
• Saves processing when loading a page
• Ability to turn it off via settings

Content-Aware SEO Titles

• Ability to generate SEO titles from the content based on defined keywords
• Keywords can have 3 different levels of priority; Low, Medium and High
• Higher priority keywords get added first
• Threads, CMS Entry and Blog Entry supported
• Scans every word in the page text for the keywords

Custom Sitemap URLs

• Allows for custom pages to be included in a sitemap
• Import multiple URLs and set default Update Frequency, Priority Range and Last Updated
• Add single new sitemap URL
• Browse all URLs in the sitemap, with search parameters
• Edit / Delete individual URLs

Log Controls

• Ability to turn off Sitemap Hit tracking
• Ability to turn off Spider Hit tracking
• Saves database space for large forums

XCache Authentication

• It's now possible to define authentication parameters for cache flushing via config.php
• DBSEO AdminCP warns you if you have admin auth enabled and no valid credentials were found
• Enables secure cache flushing when needed

Changes to Existing Features:

• The Show Post URL format can now use [thread_title] and [thread_id] in Custom formats
• The vBSEO importer now supports the vBSEO 3.2.x config_vbseo.php file as an import source
• The DragonByte SEO Admin Control Panel now respects the preferred AdminCP style you can choose when logging in to the vBulletin AdminCP.

Bug Fixes And Issue Fixes:

• Spider log updates would cause a PHP error to be displayed in search engine caches
• Un-filtering text if "&" was used in the original text would not work correctly
• Front-end tag URLs did not respect the "Filter Tag URLs" setting
• The "Maximum URL Keywords" setting did not work as intended when it was set to a value other than 0
• The [post_id] variable did not work as intended in the Show Post URL format
• The Next Thread and Previous Thread URL formats did not work as intended under certain configurations
• Generating the Blog sitemap could cause PHP errors in some circumstances
• vBulletin-powered custom 404 scripts would display a blank page, or not display correctly
• The "Forum Path" setting would not correctly create a multi-level forum path
• In certain scenarios, the "Forum Path" would display "a/a" instead of the actual forum path
• Accessing a site that allows both HTTP and HTTPS connections would use the wrong scheme if the user accessed it via HTTPS
• The Sitemap Log would not retain the Start Date and End Date values when browsing pages or sorting content
• The Spider Hit Log would not retain the Start Date and End Date values when browsing pages or sorting content
• The Excluded Pages setting would not function as intended
• If the "Force Index" setting was turned off, accessing the domain without a file or path after it would conflict with certain server configurations
• If the DBSEO AdminCP has a password, the initial page load would display an incorrect error message after the password was successfully entered
• In certain scenarios, overriding the Datastore caching would not function as intended - most notably during "Go To New Post" links
• The "Forum Path" setting no longer stores URL history
• (vB4) CMS Articles with multiple pages would not correctly display pages 2 and onwards
• (vB3) The manual sitemap generation would not automatically redirect to the next page
• (vB3) The extra database connection DBSEO opens should now close correctly

As always, thank you for your continued support

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