Version 4.2 brings several major new features, several major improvements, and a bunch of bug fixes. Most of the changes in this version have been deployed to the Free plugin version 3.1.
All the features added to this plugin version have been requested by the plugin users, and most of the other changes have been driven based on the feedback received in the past few months. So, the first major new feature is called Shortcodes Builder.
As the name says, this is a new panel that lists all the available plugin shortcodes, with easy to use interface to control all the shortcode attributes and generate the shortcode that is ready to use. This new panel will completely eliminate the need to go through plugin documentation, understand all the attributes. Some attributes depend on other attributes, so don’t get surprised when some of the changes you make to the attributes don’t reflect in the end code. And, if you enable an attribute and select value that is considered a default value, it will not be added to the shortcode.
Before this, the Shortcake UI plugin was used to generate shortcode inside TinyMCE editor, but this plugin is very much outdated and most likely dead, and on top of everything, it no longer works with Block Editor Classic Block. Support for Shortcake UI is now deprecated, and it will be removed in one of the future plugin versions (most likely 4.5 next year).
Rich Snippets support has gotten another set of new features and tools. Plugin now has a Custom Snippet Type. It is a generic snippet that can include various information about the post, but you need to set the rating type manually, and by default type name is set to ‘Thing’ which is the basic snippet type from Schema.org specification. On top of that, you can select which standard elements to include (author, dates, publisher…). There are global settings for this, and also they can be overriden for each individual post.
There are various enhancements for the snippets included and new tools to reset and remove snippet settings for individual posts/pages for selected post types so that you can apply different global settings if needed.
Finally, there is a major update to the Posts addon. This addon is used to automatically add a rating block to the single posts or pages. There was a conflict with some SEO plugins, causing the rating block to not properly get included on the single posts or pages. This has been fixed and the whole process of the embedding improved to try to detect the excerpt for exclusions and to make sure the block is added inside the BODY of the page. Changes in this version should solve various problems reported in recent months.
Several addons that depend on the changes in this plugin version have been updated, and you need to update them also to make sure all is working properly.
To see the list of all the changes, please check out the changelogs for: Book Rich Snippet Addon, GD Rating System Pro, Multi Ratings Addon, Recipe Rich Snippet Addon. If you find any issues, please, report them in the support forums for: Book Rich Snippet Addon, GD Rating System Pro, Multi Ratings Addon, Recipe Rich Snippet Addon.
