B7: [cs_content_seo] no longer contains text-only version of content - Wordpress auto excerpt returns blank

Beta
#1

[cs_content_seo] used to provide a text-only version of the page content (when created with Pro) which then gets used effectively by the built in Wordpress auto excerpt. We use Pro for individual posts (case studies / advanced portfolio posts) and these projects always have text available in them to be used for SEO / excerpt. This is no longer outputting correctly, and so the excerpt function is not returning any content from the page (as it is all built from shortcodes) and the [cs_content_seo] shortcode within the post is now returning empty.

I understand that manual excerpts can be added for all posts, but it would be great to not have to do that as the first paragraph of each case study we create is intended as the excerpt as well anyway. Is it also the case that for search results, the search needs access to as much content in the page / post as possible in order to search through it and display relevant info in the search results page?

#2

Thanks for the heads up on this!

#3

Quick update: there were some conflicts with the new system that broke how cs_content_seo works under the hood. It used to parse all the shortcode content which was helpful to create the text needed, but this was no longer viable after new changes to dynamic content and the introduction of data looping.

We’ve reworked some things here so [cs_content_seo] appears multiple times in a document. It’s basically used anywhere a V2 element might output HTML. This is stripped from the front end, but is useful for SEO plugins and also to generate the excerpt.

#4

Thanks for the update!

I believe there were some issues with dynamic content in the [cs_content_seo] process in 2.x versions of Pro. Is this something that will be fixable, even with the added complexities to dynamic content and data looping?

#5

Yes, that should all be worked out. For this release [cs_content_seo] will only include the text/html stored in the element. For example, if you have a headline element your page content might look like:

[cs_element_headline id=5][cs_content_seo]This is my headline[/cs_content_seo]

Or

[cs_element_headline id=5][cs_content_seo]This is my headline with {{dc:post:title}}[/cs_content_seo]

One of the previous issues is that we were running all the dynamic content at the time the elements were saved. With this new technique the tags are just included as part of the content and will be expanded when the excerpt is retrieved.

#6

That sounds like a great fix, maintaining the dynamic aspect as much as possible, even for behind-the-scenes things like excerpts and open graph descriptions and other metadata.

Brilliant stuff and thanks for the update!

#7

Thanks! It’s a good functional stopgap for this release and might work longterm with some further refinements. I just want to make sure the final solution is a good starting point for integration with SEO plugins like Yoast and RankMath.