Plugin Review: All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets

Verdict: It’s the best Schema.org plugin we’ve reviewed.

All In One Schema.org

Today we’re looking at the All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin by Sujay Pawar.

This is the first of our plugin review series on adding Schema.org support to your WordPress site. We’re comparing some of the most popular plugins from the WordPress directory, walking through the experience of evaluating plugins from a user’s perspective.

The Scenario: Creating a Review Site

Our example scenario is that we’re building a website to share plugin reviews. We’re getting a bit self-referential for our first review series. 🙂

In this scenario we’re creating a lot of reviews, so we want to spend as little time as possible on configuring the schema markup for each review.

On Schema.org, review items are identified as Thing > CreativeWork > Review. There are a lot of properties that can be put to use here. Let’s see if this plugin can make it all manageable.

First Impressions

The All In One header is impressive. It’s clear that the authors have taken time to make the image fit the directory layout.

We have an illustration of what a rich snippet would look like, and the snippet itself is an explanation of what the plugin does. Making use of the header for more than just a pretty picture is good attention to detail.

Screenshot of the All In One Schema.org description page.

Is this plugin actively updated? Yep!

At the time of writing this post, All In One Schema.org is compatible up to the latest version of WordPress (3.7.1). It was last updated on November 14th — less than a week ago! — so we know that the plugin authors haven’t abandoned it.

Popular with nearly 37,000 downloads.

While a large number of downloads don’t speak to plugin quality, it does give us an indicator of usage. Actively used plugins are more likely to be supported by their authors, not to mention that you’re more likely to get peer support when there are lots of other people using the plugin.

Compatibility? It works!

It’s easy to miss the Compatibility portion of the plugin page, but it’s a useful tool when you’re deciding on what plugins to test out. Again, All In One Schema.org does well here.

Plugin compatibility with current version of WordPress.

Clear documentation FTW.

The Description, Installation, FAQ, and Screenshots pages are essential for figuring out whether a plugin will do what you need it to do.

All In One’s pages are in tip-top shape. The Description page explains the purpose of rich snippets, the impact they make on a website’s search performance, the type of snippets that the plugin supports, and it invites other developers to contribute on Github.  The Screenshots page gives us a zoomed-in look at the plugin’s UI, complete with useful captions.

Screenshot of the All In One Schema.org screenshot page.

Ratings & Reviews

Right off the bat we can see that this plugin is doing pretty well. 84% of reviewers have given it a 5-star rating, earning it an average 4.7 out of 5 stars.

What are people saying? Let’s take a look:

“A very simple yet useful plugin. Keep up the good work dev’s”

“I must appreciate the quick effects of this plugin on google search.”

“It is a great help to avoid entering the snippets code manually. And the support is excellent. Many thanks Sujay and all developers. and I hope you continue the updating of this great plugin.”

“Definitely best plugin for schema.org tagging service. Amazing and quick email support + constant updates of plugin. If you want to tag all your content without deep dive into html code – use Rich snippets!”

Glowing reviews. What about the naysayers?

when i suggested a reasonable improvement (adding LocalBusiness rather than having Organization) they asked for donation in order to consider it, then added that they “are not actively working to add this “feature” so i will reconsider using it in next releases”

“Great idea – but it killed the images in the WPTouch Mobile plugin I use (and love, because it presents sites so well on Android, iPhone, etc.) …. so out it goes.”

“The author too frequently adds and then removes features that were being used. Can’t rely on this plugin to be dependable long-term.”

So we have some edge cases, but for each, the plugin author responded promptly. Not bad!

Support

Support Forums = Lots of resolved posts.

Nearly every thread in the support forum is marked as [Resolved], again showing that the plugin author is staying on top of feedback.

Screenshot of resolved posts on the support forum.

Direct contact in the plugin.

We were pleasantly surprised to find a feedback form embedded in the plugin itself — a very convenient way to contact the developers!

Screenshot of the contact form built into the plugin.

Installation

No problems were encountered during installation on our localhost testing environment. The plugin added a Rich Snippets item to our WordPress sidebar:

Screenshot of rich snippet sidebar item.

Using the Plugin

The plugin is installed, so the next question is, how do we use it?

Thankfully the plugin includes two handy tabs in its dashboard: How to Use and FAQs. The Usage Instructions on the How to Use screen are delightfully straightforward:

All In One Schema.org instructions diagram.

Let’s give it a shot: Adding a review.

I created a new post and dumped in some placeholder “lorem ipsum” text. In the Configure Rich Snippet metabox, I chose “Item Review”. Only three options were presented: The reviewer’s name, the name of the item to be reviewed, and a 1-5 star rating. Easy! I added the details and clicked Publish.

Screenshot of adding an item review.

And, on the individual post page, a Summary box was added to the end of my post:

Screenshot of the Rich Snippet summary box.

Summary box? What’s the deal with that?

This is actually addressed as part of the plugin FAQs:

We understand you don’t like the content that gets displayed on your page / post. However as per the strong recommendation of Google, the MicroData should be clearly visible to the user.

Here is a reference link of what Google says. https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-rich-snippets#display

If you don’t like the default design the content box created by plugin, you can always customise it or edit CSS located here or request professional service at $25

Fair enough. Let’s see what we can customize.

Customizing the Rich Snippets appearance.

Simplicity is the name of the game here. The customization options are limited to choosing different colours for the snippet box. Anything else will need to be handled via CSS.

Screenshot of the All In One Schema.org customization options.

That’s pretty much the extent of this plugin – it’s simple and to the point.

Update: But wait, there’s more!

Sujay Pawar, the author of the plugin, pointed out in our comments that we overlooked the Configuration settings. In this panel we can tweak all of the text:

Configuration options for the All In One Schema.org plugin.

Final Verdict

What do we like? All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets is a popular, stable, and well-supported plugin. The developer obviously cares about their work and is paying attention to feedback. The limited schema types and customization options meet our criteria to keep things as simple as possible.

What could make it better? A few more user-friendly customization options (e.g. choosing where to place the Summary box on the page, or being able to change the “Summary” text to something else) would be nice. Providing template tags or function documentation would also be handy for developers looking to integrate the plugin with custom themes.

Update: Sujay clarified a few points in our comments below. Firstly, the text can be changed (see above). If you want to display the plugin output in your template, this support thread explains how. And lastly, not letting users choose where to position the review box was a conscious decision:

“This allows users of our plugin to deactivate / delete our plugin at anytime if they don’t like the plugin and still their posts / pages where they have integrated our plugin would still look good!”

Fair reasoning, I think. So our takeaway stands strong: If you’re looking to add schema.org snippets to your site, this will do the trick.

Other Reviews of All In One Schema.org

About the author