Matthew Hutson

I think I have refined the problem, and solved it.

Facebook grabs description metadata from the posts. When I looked at the source html of one of my posts, I found this:
<meta property="og:description" content="My Post Title." />
The content there should be the beginning of the post, not the post title.

I did install the “All in One SEO” plugin, which autogenerates metadata, but it didn’t help, because the html it inserted was this:
<meta name="description" content="Here is the beginning of my post." />
Facebook is obviously ignoring meta name description and going for meta property description. (I’m not sure what the difference is. Something to do with something called Open Graph, I think.)

So I also installed a plugin called “WP Facebook Open Graph protocol,” and this enables WordPress to take the beginning of a post and insert it into the meta property description tag.

I hope the next person to Google this problem finds my plight helpful.

Matt

Thanks for your help, Christine.

I came across something saying that once a page description is lodged with Facebook, it doesn’t change, even if you change the page. I tested this theory by creating a test post (the first one after adding that bit of code to style.css), and Facebook share worked properly with it. And I got share to work properly with my one older post by manually changing its permalink and tricking Facebook. Fortunately I changed my css file before publishing a lot of posts so I don’t have to change hundreds of permalinks.

Odd that WordPress users should have to make this change to their css files at all, though.

Thanks for your response. I’m using a child of twentyeleven.

After several hours I found a solution. I created a duplicate of style.css called single_style.css and made the changes I wanted in there. And then in functions.php I added this:

add_filter( 'stylesheet_uri', 'my_stylesheet', 10, 2 );
function my_stylesheet( $stylesheet_uri, $stylesheet_dir_uri ) {
	if(is_single() )
		$stylesheet_uri = $stylesheet_dir_uri . '/single_style.css';
	else
		$stylesheet_uri = $stylesheet_dir_uri . '/style.css';
	return $stylesheet_uri;
}

I’m not sure how the code above works, but it does.

The themes/twentyeleven-child/style.css document.
I just created themes/twentyeleven-child/footer.css and made changes to that which took effect, so it looks like it’s just the stye.css document.