About two months ago, a client came up to me asking for advise on managing SEO on his site. I suggested to him that he could use the meta data in Joomla! menu manager out-of-the-box or with the help of a handful of 3rd party Joomla plugins.
A week later, he came back informing me that he gave up on using Joomla for his site. Then, I remembered about Plugin X and shared with him a screen of what we built about almost 4 years ago, and to my surprise he was super excited and wanted to get hold of it.
This led me to think that this very plugin is pretty useful. Just like how we built our own Voices, Changelog and Issue Tracker area where these extensions, plugins could really help and benefit others. Discussing this with my colleagues, we took out our thinking caps and find ways to evolve Plugin X to something more user friendly :)
After weeks of effort being sowed to polish up Plugin X, we decided to call it "Meta Manager" a.k.a MetaMan (and I was also told that there was MegaMan).
What does MetaMan do?
It allows a site administrator to easily manage the site's meta data along with Facebook's Opengraph and Twitter Card's meta. Not only does it allow you to set the meta data, you could even upload images on the page directly!
Gone are the days where you have to manually upload your images from FTP or Joomla media manager and figuring out the absolute url to these images; then update your metadata. This gives you complete and absolute control over how these items appear on your pages, articles or as a matter of fact, any extensions that you run on the site.
Check out some of the screenshots here:
Supported Joomla Versions
MetaMan works out of the box across Joomla versions 2.5 and Joomla 3.x.
Why was it called a Plugin X?
4 years back, it was so frustrating and annoying that my team and I had to view the menu item in Joomla and compare it back with the contents that is available on the site and trying to update the meta data. To make matters worst, every time a new marketing member joins the team, I have to teach them over and over again.
The process of doing this was killing my time and killing what I love to do most which was coding! Out of anger, I named it a pretty obscene name that it shouldn't be disclosed to the public :p Don't worry, I am convinced that I have removed any reference to that "obscene" word. I promise! I did a code review on myself for more than 10 times :)
What's the costing like?
Pricing for MetaMan will be $49 which includes 6 months of our fanatical support and software updates. As an introductory offer, for the next 3 days, you could get your hands on MetaMan for only $35
Who says only Wordpress has cool SEO toys :) Joomla! has cool SEO toys too!