Include more metadata for non-posts

[thompsonjoshua]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Several Parse.ly customers found that their metadata doesn't appear in Dash for non-post pages.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like for the plugin to extract the same metadata fields for non-post pages that posts receive.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I'm simultaneously pursing a request to the Parse.ly Backend team to enable a new version of the Parse.ly crawler to extract metadata from a wider variety of metadata sources and their respective standards.

Additional context

During initial development of this plugin, Parse.ly Dash did not support metadata for non-post pages but now it does.

[acicovic]

@thompsonjoshua, so the idea here to have total metadata parity between posts and non-posts?

[thompsonjoshua]

Yes that's correct. The near-term goal would be adding support for creator/author and section/category values. Adding support for keywords/tags should then achieve that parity.

[acicovic]

@thompsonjoshua: I've verified that native WP non-posts (what we would call Pages in WP, located on wp-admin's left-hand menu) don't natively support categories or tags. Author is natively supported in both posts/non-posts.

However, it seems possible to add support for categories and tags to Pages using the register_taxonomy_for_object_type() function, and I found a plugin that uses that approach.

So we might have installations where:

• Pages do not support categories/tags (default)
• Pages support categories, tags, or both (custom setup)
• Posts (that natively support categories and tags) are tracked as non-posts, thus currently stripping this information from them (user preference)

To make this feature request possible, we'd probably check whether a non-post actually has categories/tags, and include them in the metadata if it does (author should always be available).

The only complication I can currently think of is cases where users wouldn't want this behavior. Is this something you think we might encounter?

[thompsonjoshua]

Thanks! I like the idea of the conditional loading.

While it's always possible that someone doesn't want this behavior, I think the vast majority will support the enhancement. We have a collection of customers with every combination of non-post metadata.

Most do not have author names, sections, and tags. In such cases we will display a default author name of Staff, a section of Uncategorized, and no tags. Other customers take advantage of all of the metadata fields. And there are many who are somewhere in between.

It's possible to visit one's Dashboard Preferences and de-select the enabled aspects to hide some of these features. But that won't provide granular control over posts and non-post pages.