When we released version 6, we vowed to let the new structure pave the way for future improvements and enhancements. We weren’t kidding! Immediately after, we delved into our backlog of improvements and starting scheduling and building them.
Improved Performance
For the first time, this plugin now automatically detects and excludes database columns which won’t include URL values. Numeric columns, date columns, short text columns, and a few others are automatically excluded from the processes. The updates run with vastly less queries (approximately 50% less) and the entire update process is faster and lighter.
We added a new go-live-update-urls/database/column-types filter for adding or excluding column types in case you want to run the updates against non URL columns such as post_type.
Support Email Addresses
When a user’s email address matches the site’s domain and the domain is changed to a subdomain like “www,” a standard search and replace tool will prepend the “www” to the email address and break it.
From pretty much the beginning, this plugin has always supported fixing email addresses in linear data types, but until now email addresses deep within serialized data were not fixed. This is a rare case, but it does happen. Now it doesn’t matter where the email address is, it will be fixed.
Future PRO Enhancements
While the primary focus of this release was preparation for upcoming PRO version enhancements, this release only included the basic version of the plugin. The main changes coming in the PRO version are user interface related, therefore we were able to enhance the backbone provided by the basic version independently.
Miscellaneous
- Breaks database updates into a self-contained and directed class.
- Improved frequently asked questions.
- Improved grammar in readme.
- Supports counting URLs for upcoming PRO enhancements.