While a large part of the Drupal community is focusing on and getting excited about Drupal 8, it doesn't mean that Drupal 7 isn't getting any love! The latest version Drupal 7.33 includes several improvements for the RDF module which I thought this group would be interested to hear about.
Better support for schema.org search engines
The first set of changes were backported from Drupal 8 to simplify the RDFa markup generated for the note title and number of comments: now we always generate the same markup regardless of which view mode we’re in (teaser or full view). This markup has also been moved inside the main entity HTML markup to be more accessible for search engine (it was place in the <head> element before). You can view an example of the new markup on my blog or any site running Drupal 7.33, simply look for “rdf-meta” in the HTML source:
<span property="schema:name" content="Schema.org Rich Snippets with Drupal 7 and RDFa" class="rdf-meta element-hidden">
As usual, it is recommended to use the schema.org module to set up your schema.org mappings with the core RDF module, you can read some documentation for example for the Person, Recipe and Event content types. Please don’t hesitate to file support requests in the schema.org module issue queue if you have questions!
For those interested in the details of those improvements, the issues are #2130673, #1323830 and #2301955.
Better performance
The other improvement that is included in Drupal 7.33 is #1338966: Introduce _rdf_mapping_load_multiple() to reduce queries which will improve performance for sites that have many bundles.
Credits
A lot of people worked hard to make these fixes happen. I want to give a bit shout-out to the RDF code sprint team which have been helping a lot with backporting the patches, reviewing and testing: Jamie Fallon, Chris Wells, Kay VanValkenburgh, Jesse Day and Leslie Glynn. Thanks also to Logan Smyth, Jeff Geerling, Pushpinder Rana, Al Steffen, for their help and finally thanks to David Rothstein for his thorough reviews and committing the patches to Drupal 7.x.