Migrating Suffusion SEO options for posts

Few days ago, Sayontan made a great announcement. He continue to support the development of Suffusion and will release a new version of theme in short time: https://aquoid.com/news/2015/05/photonic-version-1-49/

These are very great news indeed, for months we live with the fear of losing Suffusion and I didn’t find any other theme with Suffusion flexibility.

But in the future releases of Suffusion, Sayontan will have to remove the SEO options because they are considered “plugin territory” by WordPress Themes Review Team, so new versions will not be approved if they continue to contain SEO options.

For users which used the Suffusion SEO for posts, maybe for years, this can become a nightmare. Imagine how to copy all meta-data written at Suffusion SEO tab for each post and paste them in a SEO plugin, when you have hundreds or thousands of posts.

Thinking to his users, Sayontan want to write a plugin to migrate Suffusion SEO options but he didn’t have time for this. For helping him, and for helping Suffusion users to easily migrate Suffusion SEO options settled for posts to some SEO third party plugins, I come with 2 solutions.

1. Suffusion to All In One SEO Pack Migration.

For those who want to use ALL IN ONE SEO PACK, I took the plugin All in One SEO Pack Importer written by Michael Torbert, the creator of AIO SEO Pack plugin, and I updated his plugin for using with Suffusion. The original plugin was written for Thesis theme.

My new plugin can be downloaded from here: Download Suffusion to AIO SEO Migration plugin

I don’t upload it to repository as Sayontan can come with a much better solution. But if you don’t want to wait can use this fix.

So, install All in One SEO Pack, download and install my plugin from above link. Set the General Settings for All In One SEO, even by copying the options from Suffusion Options -> Backend -> SEO/META Settings. Finally go at Settings -> Suffusion->AIOSEOP Migration and hit “Migrate Suffusion SEO Data”.

When you use “Migrate” button, the AIO SEO descriptions and keywords are replaced with Suffusion ones for all posts where Suffusion meta data are defined. If you use AIO SEO Pack for the first time, this is not a problem. Suffusion meta tags are migrated and AIOSEOP fields are filled with Suffusion data. But if you already use AIOSEOP for some time and you have descriptions and/or keywords filled in both AIOSEOP and Suffusion SEO fields (not recommended, but may happens) need to take care of this:

• if you want to keep Suffusion data, again, is enough to hit “Migrate” button.
• but if you consider that AIOSEOP settings are more relevant, will have to make the migration in 2 steps. First, before using my plugin, go to All in ONE SEO -> Importer & Exporter and export Post Data to a file on your computer. Use my plugin and migrate the Suffusion data. Then go again to AIOSEOP Importer & Exporter and import data from that file saved on your computer. In this way will have old AIOSEOP data for all posts which had these data defined, but migrated Suffusion data for posts which didn’t had AIOSEOP data before.

2. SEO Data Transporter.

If you don’t like All in One SEO Pack, on WordPress Repository exist a free plugin which transport SEO data between a lot of themes and/or plugins – SEO Data Transporter. Unfortunately the original plugin don’t have Suffusion in its options. But I changed a plugin file for adding Suffusion in its lists of accepted themes.

So, install the plugin from Repository. By ftp replace the original plugin.php from seo-data-transporter folder with this one downloaded from here: Download plugin.php for SEO Data Transporter.

Now go to Tools -> SEO Data Transport and can migrate the Suffusion SEO data for posts to any supported SEO plugins by your choice.

The considerations from point 1. are still valid – after migration the Suffusion SEO data are removed for each post and the SEO plugin will contain these information. The changes are applied only for individual posts, general settings of each plugin must be settled manually.

After migration, disable and remove any of these plugins for transporting SEO data, they are not needed until you don’t want to change the SEO plugin. And go at Suffusion Options -> Backend -> SEO/Meta Settings and check “Disable SEO”. You are ready for a Suffusion version without SEO.

WARNING! Never minimize the importance of backups. Before doing the migration make a backup of your WordPress database. These plugins will alter directly database fields, so, if somethings goes wrong you will be able to restore the previous data from backup.