Today is WordPress plugin day here at the Internet Marketing Monitor. In addition to releasing our new IMM-Meta Tags plugin, we’re also releasing version 2.1 of our popular IMM-Glossary plugin.

While the release is primarily about under-the-hood changes, those changes are significant and we think all IMM-Glossary users should upgrade as soon as possible.

Why?

Version 2.0 introduced a new dynamic pop-up option for displaying definitions. Based on feedback that is now the most popular way for users to display their definitions. To facilitate that pop-up, the IMM-Glossary plugin used JavaScript.

There was only one problem: all of the terms had to be loaded on every post and page to get the dynamic pop-ups to work. If you had 130 terms in your glossary, all 130 terms were loaded into <SPAN> tags on each and every page.

As you can probably guess… that’s not really good for a site from an SEO perspective. Plus, it slowed down the rendering of sites with large glossaries.

The solution was to re-write that part of the plugin to use AJAX instead of JavaScript. The result? No loading of all terms! Terms are now loaded dynamically into the pop-ups as they are needed. The new plugin pulls your definitions out of the database in real-time and loads them on an “as needed” basis.

The one side-effect of this change is a slight delay while the definition loads. We’re talking a second or two here at the most. To make sure your readers know something is happening, the pop-up will now display “Loading…” while the definition is pulled from the database.

Give this new version a try (which also includes a couple of small maintenance changes / fixes) and let us know what you think!