Mambo 4.6 Sneak Peeks: SEO
 The community talks, we listen. When Team Mambo was formed, we became aware that the community had been asking for a number of features and fixes for a long time. We are pleased to tell you that for many of these, the wait is now over.
You said you wanted better Search Engine Optimization. We listened and we acted. With the release of Mambo 4.6 we have introduced a number of changes which will assist you in optimizing your Mambo sites for search engines.
We have made changes to SEF, the core rewriting of search engine friendly URLs. You will find SEF is more reliable and has improved functionality. The SEF built into the core now allows Archives to be displayed correctly. Our goal was to provide a robust in-built basic SEF that functions well regardless of whether you choose to add a 3rd Party SEF extension. 3rd Party extensions, such as ReMOSEf are well supported, but separate from our Mambo SEF.
You said you wanted page titles to display correctly in browsers. With Mambo 4.6, visitors will now see Page Title - SiteName, just as you wanted it.
Metadata was an issue for many of you and you asked for changes. We agreed with you - the handling of metadata, particularly on the Frontpage, was not good practice. The changes we have made are: - Components are free to add metadata for keywords and description;
- The content component adds tags EXCEPT when it is some kind of blog;
- The global metadata is added ONLY IF there is no metadata from the component.
In other words, you can now have unique metadata (keywords and description) for every page on your site. Metadata is no longer appended to the Frontpage by the content items you publish on the Frontpage. And, if you don't want to use metadata throughout your site you can still use the Global tags, or none at all. The community asked for flexibility - you got it!
Two other changes have been made in response to community requests that are not strictly SEO-related, but which still improve sites for search engine spidering.
You said you wanted an improved Pathway and didn't want to see "Home>Home" appearing on your Frontpage. We acted on this too, and you will now see Pathway behaving as you asked.
Members of the community expressed concern that it was too easy to identify Mambo sites on the Net. Many have been commenting out the code that generates <meta name="Generator" content="Mambo - Copyright 2000 - 2005 Miro International Pty Ltd. All rights reserved." />. We listened, and we removed it. Your site's source code will no longer include that metatag.
From a usability perspective, gone are the days of having your URL set in stone. We have taken advantage of Apache's domain aliasing and now visitors to your site can come in through either www or NO-www. We have added SSL support to this too, so you truly get the flexibility you have been asking for.
These changes were long overdue and we are very pleased to be able to give them to you in Mambo 4.6. Development never stops and there are further improvements tagged for future releases of our award-winning CMS.
4.6 also includes other changes and improvements unrelated to SEO so be sure to check out our other announcements. The Public Beta of Mambo 4.6 is out now, with the first Release Candidate (ver 4.6 RC1) due the week of April 9. You can download the Public Beta, or any of the official Mambo Open Source CMS Core files from the Mambo Code forge.
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