I’m curious to know why you would like to do that. Not being a smart@ss or anything…I genuinely don’t know why someone would want to do that.
I think my metatags plugin will do what you want: moisie_templates_metatags
Unless you mean the output of the_meta() within each page.
Thread Starter
Pauls
(@pauls)
Hi moisie. I think that’ll work.
And Moose – It’s the unique meta description tag I’m after, so that when my individual posts show up in search engines, the descriptions in the listings not identical to all my other posts.
I had a hunch this could be done because the title tag can be different for each WP post, so inserting something in a meta description tag couldn’t be too difficult.
I’ll give it a whirl and see what happens.
Thanks
You would think this would work:
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>
but it doesn’t quite work, and that’s a shame.
I found a suggestion to use
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo htmlentities(get_the_excerpt()); ?>" />
but that also doesn’t seem to work for my wordpress 1.5 blog.
am I missing something?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt
“This tag must be within The Loop.”
You need a bit of script that extracts the excerpt from the database outside of The Loop. There’s a few ways I can think of doing that, but here’s an example that makes use of get_posts()
:
<?php if(is_single()) :
get_posts('numberposts=1');
foreach ($posts as $post) :
$excerpt = $post->post_excerpt;
endforeach;
?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo htmlentities($excerpt); ?>" />
<?php endif; ?>
NuclearMoose, if I’m understanding your question, the answer is simply that some search engines display the meta description in their search results.
I’m a bit surprised that this was left out of WordPress; lack of a meta description makes WordPress’ output incomplete. If there is no easy way to fix this (such as 1.2’s use of the_excerpt), that’s why people are writing plugins — they’re fixing something that should have been included in the first place.
Kafkaesqui, for some reason I’m not having any luck with that, either.
I don’t know how this can be a big problem since allot of my traffic comes from search engines.
Moisie: I tried installing your plugin w/o success. I tried leaving a comment in the plugin post but received a 404 error fr. your server.
I’ve just installed the file in my plugins folder. When I visit my Plugins activation screen I see the entire file displaying where there should be a single line describing the plugin. I clicked on the activation link & visited my Write screen to see where or if the metatag feature displayed. I can’t find anything.
This plugin is dead meat unless someone can help me figure out what I did wrong.
I guess the plugin isn’t working?
Brian, it’s a matter of well-formed HTML, and:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/31266
Kafkaesqui, that little workaround was wonderful, thank you.
Sorry for bumping this old thread but I`ve been using Kafkaesqui´s solution above to this problem but since my blog is pretty old there are now many pages with an empty meta description tag.
How can Kafkaesqui´s code be modified so that if the excerpt field is empty, the whole meta description tag is left out of the page?
Thanks!