2015-08-21 What's up?

[shadowcat]

The BlackCat CMS Release 1.2 is coming nearer, and we now focus on the SEO functions. First, we included them into the page properties, but then decided to make an Admin Tool instead. As some SEO options can make things worse, they should be in the hands of experts and not the common user.

So this is how it is going to work:

In the Backend under Settings -> SEO Settings there will be an additional option that allows to set the default priority for sitemap.xml. Without any addons, BC will be able to create a sitemap.xml on demand. The default page will have prio 1.0, all other pages 0.5 or whatever you set as your default. Please note: Do not change this if you're not sure what this is for and how it effects the search engines that visit your page:

The optional Admin Tool - called SEO Tool - allows to set several options on a per page base.

• Page title
• Description
• Keywords

Yes, these can also be set in the page properties flyout, but I thought it would be best to have them in the tool, too.

• Canonical URL
• 301 Redirect
• Sitemap settings (priority, update frequency)
• META Robots settings

The tool also checks if the page title is between 30 and 55 characters length and the description between 70 and 156 characters. It will show a note if not.

What else?

There's an open bug with multilanguage support. A possible workaround is to enable the "Homepage redirection" under Settings -> System settings. A fix will be published as soon as we have it.

Some new modules were added to our Repository. For example, we now have a simple but functional Comments module you may also use as a simple Guestbook. (http://blackcat-cms.org/page/add-ons/or ... em&item=85) There's also a Feedreader that allows to include external RSS Feeds into your page. (http://blackcat-cms.org/page/add-ons/or ... em&item=88)