Last week, I saw a tweet that identified a challenge for the WordPress UI:
I wasn’t alone in seeing this as an issue that was worth solving:
Knowing that plugins are best when they are built and supported by teams rather than individuals, Norcross and I started collaborating (though in the end, the majority of the code was written by him). What we came up with a plugin to improve the experience for site creators. As the responses to Mr. Williams tweet shows, It’s very common to mark a site as inaccessible to search engines and then forget to uncheck that setting when it comes time to launch.
BRAD aims to solve this by moving the notice about search engine discouragement to the top of the dashboard. It also becomes a recurring dismissable notification.
- Every week, there is a check to see if the site is still hidden from search engines, and if it is the notice comes back
- If you change the
siteurl
or home
options, then the notice comes back (note, you need to change these via the UI or via wp-cli, directly changing the DB)
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BRAD is already loved by many
I was lost before BRAD
Before this plugin, I never knew if my site was excluded from search engines or not. And if it was, where the heck did they move the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox to?
Thank you, BRAD
Heavy praise from the leader of a
great WordPress Agency!
Life changer!
BRAD literally changed my life – now BRAD tells me where to go every day!
It feels amazing to help change the life of someone who
wrote the book on WordPress (over and over again)
If you would like to contribute to BRAD, join us on
Github. If you are building sites,
add BRAD to your WordPress site today!