On Tuesday 16 August, wp-parsely 3.5.0 will be released into staging, followed by a production release on Tuesday 23 August. It is currently an optional upgrade and does not introduce any breaking changes coming from 3.x versions. This release does not affect customers who don’t use Parse.ly or use an integration outside of mu-plugins.
wp-parsely 3.5 is a minor release that adds a couple of features on top of wp-parsely 3.4:
- A live preview has been added for the Recommendations Block when the Block’s icon is being hovered in the Block Inserter.
- An “Open Links in New Tab” option has been added to the Recommendations Block.
- The “Metadata Format” setting has been moved into the “Basic Settings” section in the plugin’s settings page.
wp-parsely 3.4 (unavailable in mu-plugins) introduced the following features:
- Content Helper. Provides editors and writers a list of the website’s most successful similar posts to the one that is currently being edited in the WordPress Editor.
- Filter override notifications in the settings page, to know when particular settings are getting overridden by a filter.
- wp-parsely debug information in the Site Health page that can be helpful for troubleshooting or when reporting issues.
Note: wp-parsely 3.4 and newer will throw a deprecation warning when calling the construct_parsely_metadata() function. This only affects custom Parse.ly integrations that call wp-parsely code (mu-plugins and regular wp-parsely users are unaffected).
For a detailed list of changes, please consult the version 3.4 and version 3.5 changelogs.
Current state of wp-parsely versions
Currently, wp-parsely 3.3 remains the default version for VIP sites that use Parse.ly through mu-plugins and are not pinned to a specific version.
3.5 is expected to become the default version in the future (there will be no 3.4 release for mu-plugins). The exact dates will be announced prior to the upgrade. In the meantime, all customers are encouraged to test the 3.5 release.
We also strongly suggest to all customers who are pinned to older wp-parsely versions to consider whether this is required, as pinning to old versions prevents from having the latest features and updates. In addition, old wp-parsely versions may start to be phased-out as new versions of wp-parsely are being released. As such, we recommend unpinning and following the natural wp-parsely release flow whenever possible.
Testing wp-parsely 3.5
The 3.5 release can be tested by using the following code:
add_filter(
'wpvip_parsely_version',
function() {
return '3.5';
}
);
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