In WordPress, we found various query endpoints that can be malformed to create broken pages. Backlinks to these pages can harm your site’s ranking. In this update, we added advanced query protection, which you can enable via the robots meta settings.

The “Connected Social Pages” input fields will now disappear when you empty them. They have never proven to work, and Google has deprecated them. We also removed the transient caching for JSON-LD scripts, as it wasn’t helping anyone.

On the other hand, we added a new feed indexing option, Discord sharing options (oEmbed, theme color), and the aforementioned advanced query protection option. Support for EDD and Polylang has been expanded, and we reintroduced the hyphen option for titles (which is the new default).

In this update, we also bring a few other quality-of-life changes, as well. We added a dozen new filters, touched up the interface, streamlined the query handler, and fixed known corner-case issues and bugs.

WordPress 5.3 has a bug where the timezone set in PHP is taken into account when creating permalinks. Since this bug can cause canonical URLs with dates to point to a nonexistent page, we’re sending out this patch where TSF sets the timezone to flat UTC for its front-end generation.

The proper fix in WordPress 5.3.1 is due in about three weeks from now, after which we’ll consider reverting these changes.

Google Search has a new bug in their parser, which causes pages to be deindexed unintentionally when a specific combination of robots-settings are used. To work around this bug, we changed how the recently introduced copyright directive settings work.

We also fixed three bugs and added minor improvements.

To accommodate the amended copyright laws in France, we added new site-wide options for new robots directives. We also fixed a few bugs and added various improvements.

Even though we churned 40% of the code, we only confirmed two bugs in that update. This minor update addresses those bugs.