SiteTree 7.0: A Nest of New Features

Today is the day. SiteTree turns into a premium plugin to all intents and purposes. As disclosed about a month ago, this change of course is the offspring of my current financial situation, but also of the will to give a future to the project.

SiteTree is now distributed only through this website as part of a yearly subscription called 'Access Pass', that in addition to SiteTree, it gives access to Multilingual Leaf, the only official add-on currently available for SiteTree.

Just a note: until July 31st, Access Passes will be purchasable at half the price by using the code SITETREE7 at checkout.

"But wait, where did it go Wonder Leaf?" You might ask. And I would reply: "right into SiteTree 7.0!"

Wonder Leaf, Now Built Into SiteTree

Before I go into details, I want to let you know that the idea behind Wonder Leaf is not ending with it, but it stays firmly tied to my work, because life cannot but be celebrated.

Wonder Leaf's legacy is made up of three main functionalities, which make using SiteTree even more fruitful than before:

Group Pages by Topic

When it comes to organising the hyper-list of Pages in your Site Tree, the keyword is Topic: you tick a setting, assign a Topic to each series of Pages, and let SiteTree do all the grouping-work.

Creating, assigning and re-assigning Topics will be familiar and quickly done.

The Pinging Log

A detailed log of the latest thirty pinging events is now always at hand, accessible through an unobtrusive UI element that can be recalled at need with just one click, so that you can immediately investigate about errors, or know which publishing action triggered an automatic ping.

Exclude Web Pages and Flag Ghost Pages, in Bulk

Specific user controls in the Bulk Edit Box of WordPress are the only target of your mouse when the need arises to exclude more web pages at once or flag multiple Pages as Ghost Page.

Also, the 'Pages' screen of WordPress is now enriched by a custom column named 'Excluded From', populated at need by a varied array of badges among which one labelled 'Everywhere' makes very easy to spot a Ghost Page.

Image and Video Sitemaps

Up until SiteTree 6.0, information about images attached to web pages appeared directly into the Google Sitemaps, sometimes with a drawback: performance reduction. With SiteTree 7.0 instead, the Google Sitemaps contain only the strictly necessary information, the collection of the information about images and videos attached to the web pages listed in the Google Sitemaps has now been delegated to distinct and content-specific Sitemaps.

The Sitemap Index dynamically generated by SiteTree keeps acting as an access point to the whole family of Sitemaps, grown larger with the introduction of stand-alone Image and Video Sitemaps, and its location keeps being user-editable. So, nothing else has changed.

Upgrading From SiteTree 6.0 or Older

The upgrade to SiteTree 7.0 from an old version — as much old as SiteTree 1.5.3 can be — it's totally automated and silent. But in the event you need assistance, remind yourself that I am here primarily to help.