Sem-Cache already delivered great results in website performance when compared to WP  Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.   With version 2.11 of Sem-Cache, performance is improved and a few hidden bugs squashed.  Simply upgrade the plugin.  I would recommend turning caching off then back on to get the cached rebuilt immediately.

Full change log as follows:

– New: async attribute added to javascript includes
– Change: Updated htaccess ruleset to improve caching for new asset types
– Fix: Htaccess access rules caused lack of caching of css and javascripts files with querystring parameters
– Change: Static pages are now held 24 hours
– Change: Pages with semiologic contact form are cached again (back out prior disabling)
– Change: Clarify which php memcached library is supported in Admin screen
– Fix: url_to_domain php static warning corrected

Semiologic

Not sure why it took us so long but Semiologic now has a Github account.   You can simply find it under Semiologic.   I know, novel.

Currently some of the old, forked plugin that were part of the original Semiologic Pro are there.     This account also serves as the home for the master Semiologic Pinnacle and Featured Child themes.  These are now public for the world to see, fork and contribute.

Semiologic

The Semiologic SEO plugin has been part of the Semiologic Pro package for many years and has served site's SEO needs well.  Over the past years that have been many awesome SEO plugins released with all sorts of new capabilities, especially Yoast's (formerly WordPress) SEO plugin.

For those wishing to move on to other plugins and not have to reenter all the SEO data, we have forked the SEO Data Transporter plugin to add Semiologic SEO to the plugins supported.

You can find more details and the download link at Semiologic SEO Data Transporter.

Semiologic

Semiologic Google Analytics 6.0 has been released.   The main focus of this release is the support for Google's Universal Analytics, which left Beta on April 2nd.

An option has been added to use the new Universal Analytics tracking code.  This is on by default as Google has recently converted over the analytics accounts to use the new format.   Previously they had indicated a manual upgrade step would be needed.  With the cutover by Google to the new version, we will automatically use this new code.   The previous Event Tracking and the Page Ranker code has been converted over as part of this release.

You also have the ability to turn on the Display Advertising tracking feature for those people wanting Remarketing and Audience reporting.

Full change log includes:

• Support new Universal Analytics tracking code.
• Adds option to turn on Display Tracking when using Universal Analytics.
• Fix Event Tracking failing to track some events with some caching plugins that concat javascript files.

Semiologic

A new version of the Semiologic SEO plugin has just been released.   The main driver for the release was fixing a bug introduced in version 2.5 that prevented you from saving your Google Publisher url in the settings screen.   Obviously that needed to be fixed.   While in there I went ahead and added meta robots directives that will prevent Google, Bing and others from keeping indexing the extraneous WordPress Archive type pages and out of the search result listings.

Hence the WordPress Archive and Special pages will now have the following meta robots directives:

• Date archives – noindex, follow
• Author archives -  noindex, follow
• Tag archives  -  noindex, follow
• Category archives -  index, follow (actually the meta robots line is simply not present in the html output)
• Search results pages -  noindex, follow
• 404 pages -  noindex, follow

Full 2.6 changelog:

• Archive type pages – author, date, tags and search and 404 pages are now set to 'noindex, follow' to removing indexing of these pages.  Category pages will continued to be indexed.
• Tweak the Page and Post Title & Meta box.
  • Moved up higher on page editor.
  • Clarified purpose by changing to SEO Title & Meta
  • Removed incorrectly displayed 'Home' from field labels
• Make sure field input is properly sanitized.
• Fixed: Google Publisher entry was not being saved after change made in 2.5.

Note in version 2.5,  the entry of the home page Google Authorship capability was removed as Google simply stated, "don't do that!"  Your individual google+ profile should only be linked to single blog posts, pages and author pages.

Semiologic

Many, many years Denis created the Original Semiologic theme (2005 to be exact).  It existed well before all the "premium" themes and theme shops and clubs.   It's primary competitor was Chris Pearsons' Thesis theme.   In 2009 the Semiologic theme was retired and a greatly improved and more full functional theme, Semiologic Reloaded was released.   In 2010 any maintenance on the original theme had ceased.   Until now…

Denis' original theme was used by quite a few sites and some of these are still running outdated versions, which means they are running old versions of WordPress too.   At the request of a few people I've gone ahead and updated the theme to be compatible with WordPress 3.9 as well as back port some of the bug fixes that went into Semiologic Reloaded.  A few select enhancements were added too.  With that the Legacy Semiologic Theme version 6.1 has been released.

Version 6.1 Change Log:

• Added post thumbnails support
• Fix: Sidebar widget lists with long post/page titles don't overflow widget boundaries
• Roll in bug fixes from sem-reloaded theme
• Added missing required WP css class rules
• Use size_format in place of deprecated wp_convert_bytes_to_hr
• Fixed incorrect url being generated for hierarchies with children of children in Pages, Nav-Menus and Silo widgets. url was being generated as parent/grandparent/child
• Alter css encoding for header image shadow for W3C compliance
• Fix unknown index warnings
• WP 3.9 compat

6.1 download

…back to Semiologic Reloaded 2.0 development….

Semiologic

All the Semiologic plugins and themes have been released for compatibility with WordPress 3.9.   WordPress 3.9 introduced the Widget Customizer functionality and upgraded the editor to TinyMCE 4.0.   These changes required changes for several of the plugins namely Widget Contents, Inline Widgets and Nav Menus.

As for WordPress 3.9, version 3.9.1 was released with 34 fixes but a 3.9.2 is looming with another 17 fixes.  This was not one of the prettiest releases for the WordPress team.   With 3.9.1 out you are probably ok to go ahead and update now but know you still may encounter some issues, primarily around the editor.

Next look for a Semiologic Reloaded 2.0 Development version to appear with all sorts of new goodies.   We needed to get the 3.9  stuff out for obvious reasons.

Semiologic

Though not as visible there are always good things happening behind the scenes.  Work on version 2.0 of the Semiologic Reloaded theme is progressing  well.

The theme now has:

• Breadcrumb navigation widget
• Post navigation widget
• Drop down menu support based on the Semiologic menu creation approach!!
• Further schema.org encoding
• and the biggie ….. it is fully responsive!!!!

I'm still working out what to do with the menus on the smaller screens.   Also with some changes needed for the responsiveness I have to touch all 60 skins!   I'm looking at some retooling of those to minimize the edits.  I also need to figure out what to do with the Header Boxes and Footer Boxes panels on the smaller screen sizes.

Things I'd still like to get accomplished are:

• Add some google font support
• Support the native WP menu system
• Enhance the custom css capabilities to put more power in the user's hands for modifying the skins
• Add a minimal/"clean" skin family.

The target is now the end of March.   The good news is that I have been able to remain backwards compatible with the current theme releases while taking Semiologic into the future.

Watch for more news.

Mike

Semiologic

Version 2.6 of the Semiologic Cache has been released.    The new release new features as well as a few bug fixes:

• Added ability to manually disable caching for a page.
• Pages that include the Semiologic Contact Form widget are no longer cached. Caching conflicted with spam prevention techniques and was resulting in occasional false positives.
• Fix invalid operation warning message in the cache-fs.php file
• Updated htaccess caching rules

Manual Disabling of Page Cache

The new release adds the ability to manually exclude a page from the static cache.   It supports 2 detection methods to not cache a page.

1) If the text 'sem_do_not_cache' is found anywhere on the page, the plugin simple ignores generating a static version of the page.

If you're using the Semiologic Script Manager plugin, you can add

<!–sem_do_not_cache–>

to the header area when editing the page. Alternatively you can drop the <!–sem_do_not_cache–> into the HTML tab or a page to add to the page content. The tag be hidden in the page content.

OR

2) If the PHP constant DONOTCACHEPAGE is set to 'true', caching of the page is ignored.

define( 'DONOTCACHEPAGE', true );

Note: Asset caching (css and js) still occurs. This flag only effects static page caching.

Semiologic

I have released all the Semiologic WordPress plugins and the Semiologic Reloaded Theme that have been tested with WordPress 3.8.   For those with a valid membership simply upgrade from your WordPress dashboard.

To upgrade:

1. As with any upgrading it is always advisable to backup your site and database just as a precaution.
2. I recommend upgrading to the latest Version Checker plugin first.
3. Next Update your plugins
4. Update the Semiologic Reloaded theme
5. Upgrade to WordPress 3.8.
6. Install and activate the TinyMCE Advanced plugin.  You can use the WordPress Plugins->Add New to search for  the plugin. (more below)

I didn't want to hold up people from getting from WP 3.6 to 3.8 so a majority of the releases are simply tested releases.  If a version number is N.N.1 (or another 3rd digit) no new functionality was added.    Any plugin that has a new 2nd digit has either bug fixes or some features added.

In regards to the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, previously we bundled a bunch of useful add-ons to WordPress' TinyMCE editor and auto-configured them in the toolbar.   With these add-ons needing to keep track with TinyMCE updates in each WP release, bundling the appropriate add-ons is becoming a pain.   We'll revert back to the pre-sem-reloaded days where TinyMCE Advanced was included as a separate addon.

Thanks for the patience.  Go ahead and upgrade your sites to WP 3.8.

Semiologic