Publish updates of the yoastseo library on NPM

[Kingdutch]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm the maintainer of the Drupal module that uses the YoastSEO checker. I was working on a rewrite of the module to be able to add more of the features you've added in recent releases, and that rewrite was quite difficult.

During your move to a monorepo for wordpress-seo you've made quite a few changes that would make life a lot easier for external integrators. (Such as using a simpler translation system that can be compatible with what Drupal uses, and fixing a lot of the ES6 exports for tree-shaking). However, it also seems that at the same time you've stopped publishing yoastseo as separate JavaScript package on NPM. This has caused the rewrite to be mostly halted because it means there's no way forward.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would love it if you could resume publishing the standalone JavaScript version so that it may be integrated in non-wordpress projects.

Why do you think this feature is something we should consider for the Yoast SEO plugins?

There's nearly 20.000 sites using the Drupal version that now have no way forward.

Additional context

I've searched through all the repositories and your website to see whether there was any outward communication on this being a deliberate decision or not and came up empty. Nor could I find any issue tracker that was working towards a 2.0.0 release, although there have been numerous releases of the Wordpress plugin itself.

[Djennez]

@jdevalk @herregroen for your information / consideration ☝️

[aulonm]

Any progress on this? Our project would greatly benefit from the newest changes since the last standalone release (1.91.0)

[herregroen]

Hi! This is something we're actively working on right now. I unfortunately don't have an immediate date as of yet, there's some thing we're fixing as part of this process to make sure that the package we publish will no longer require any custom webpack ( or whatever other tool you're using ) configuration.

I've asked the team working on this to share an update here in this issue once we get close enough to set a date

[flyke]

I'm guessing the team is still hard at work and not yet 'close enough to set a date' but still, is there any ballpark guess ? Like are we talking about weeks, months, or definitely not ready this year or something ?
Greatly appreciated, thanks !

[lexsoft00]

+1 are there any news on this?

Thank you for the hard work! Can't wait to see the new update.

[SimeonGriggs]

👋 Hi there! It would be great to be able to update the Sanity SEO Pane plugin to a newer version of the Yoast library as well!

[DevinEdwards]

+1 to this. Thanks for all the hard work, would love to see the updates published to NPM 🙏🏼

[joshuaboltz]

@Kingdutch I see the NPM package for this was updated just this week. Does this unblock anything to allow the Drupal Yoast 2.x module to use yoastseo.js again instead of the rtseo.js?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/yoastseo

Edit:
Oh nevermind, I see. When I go to https://www.npmjs.com/package/yoastseo
The repo is https://github.com/Yoast/javascript
But, that repo has been archived, and the newer repo is https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo

And it sounds like that codebase has not yet been made available on NPM.

But, also I found this NPM package:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/yoastseo-lite

Although, it looks like it hasn't been updated in some time. So, I may be confused with how the module integrated with Yoast JS between 1.x and 2.x, but trying to help see a path forward if I can.

[harryyaprakov]

Hey, I would also be very happy to see this wonderful page updated and renewed.

My main issue is the use of node-sass coming from sassdash, as node-sass is now depricated and does not bode well with node 18.

[joshuaboltz]

Any updates on this?

[orkutmuratyilmaz]

Thank you for all the hard work and beautiful contributions. Waiting for the new updates too:)

[mhkuu]

Hi all 👋 I am the dev lead of the team responsible for Yoast's content analysis (i.e., packages/yoastseo) and I was just notified of the existence of this issue.

You can follow the current progress on the release process in this PR. You can even consider already using this branch as a dependency in package.json, for example through a Git Submodule as shown in this example from the TYPO3 integration.

I'm eager to learn if you find any problems, because obviously, a lot has changed since the last NPM release. I'm also open to your feedback here: please let us know when you find something that's broken, poorly documented, or otherwise misguided. However, do note that our main focus continues to be on our WordPress plugin and Shopify add-on.

While I'm hesitant to give an exact ETA of the actual NPM release, do know that we try to make this release happen as soon as reasonably possible.

With regard to the Node version, we are working on getting all of our packages ready for Node 20. You can follow the progress in this PR.

[SimeonGriggs]

@mhkuu Congratulations on today's release 🎉

Is there any chance that's going to get us closer to an updated npm package? 🙇‍♂️

[mhkuu]

In #20651 we cleaned up the package quite heavily. We will work from there onwards.

I'm inviting everyone to test the current trunk version of packages/yoastseo (or wait for the 22.5 release next week for a stable tag), see my previous comment for an approach that works. In the meantime we will be working on getting stuff ready for an alpha release to NPM.