Iceclog 2.6.0: updates for Security, PHP 7.4 and SEO

Version 2.6.0 of Iceclog is released with updates for security, PHP 7.4, and SEO. Below the release notes:

Security maintenance

Security maintenance is a core improvement in the 2.6.0 release. Meaning that we ensured that Iceclog.com works according to the latest industry standards:

Firstly, we updated our core mechanism to the latest version and tested that everything works correctly. Secondly, we migrated our servers from PHP 7.3 to PHP 7.4 and conducted staging tests. Furthermore, we updated the used modules to the newest versions and removed several obsolete ones.

Finally, we published the latest version of our Iceclog network to our members. Our site now runs within the PHP 7.4 environment.

You can find detailed PHP benchmarks and tests here.

SEO improvements

We are constantly working on SEO improvements to ensure our content gets to the right audience. For this release, we made these SEO improvements:

Firstly, we configured a mechanism that enables us to check the quality of our content in terms of SEO. This mechanism notifies us about what we can do to improve our content. These improvements are related both to SEO and to the readability of our posts.
Secondly, we are working on the improvement of meta descriptions and titles. This will result in our content getting better visibility within search engines.
Finally, we optimized the way we are generating sitemaps.

You can find the new version of our sitemap here.

Further, you can notice that our sitemaps are now grouped in categories – posts, pages, categories, etc. – which leads to better readability by search engines. Also, this provided better insight into what content is new in our network.

Example of Iceclog.com sitemap

Improved development procedures

In parallel, we are improving the way we work. Communication between our teams, sharing information, and processes are very important.

Having that in mind, within this release we improved our development and deployment procedures. Now, we have a brand new staging mechanism that we use to stress-test our new features.