Channel meta [feature request] about seomatic HOT 5 CLOSED

So first, a preamble... which is that retrofitting a plugin like SEOmatic to a project is always going to be a little less clean than if it was designed to use it from the get-go. It really is a different set of requirements for the plugin to be good at being retrofitted vs. being good at working out of the box in a new project.

That said, a few people have suggested the idea of "defaults" for the SEOmeta Meta FieldType. I'm onboard, and like the idea. Here's the problem. Fields in Craft are their own little islands; they can exist in a dozen or more EntryType layouts.

So the global settings that you can assign to a field exist outside of the context of any Field Layout. You can't (I know, I started to try) declare some settings that allow you pick one of the other fields in the Field Layout to pull from like you can do from within the Entry itself.

At best, what can be done is I display a popup menu of all sections, and than all Field Layouts where the field exists, the user picks one, and then they pick the field to pull from. It's a little gross, and the other problem with this approach is because the settings are global, if that SEOmatic Meta field is included in two Field Layouts, then it's going to be defaulting them both to the same thing. Which I think probably is never good.

That's why I stopped at implementing this; I'm trying to figure out a better way to do it, but failing.

from seomatic.

As a solution for now, you can do what you want by using Twig to set your meta, something like this:

{% set seomaticMeta = { 
    seoTitle: entry.title,
    seoDescription: entry.summary,
    seoKeywords: extractKeywords(entry.body),
    seoImage: seomaticMeta.seoImage,
    canonicalUrl: entry.url,
    twitter: { 
        card: seomaticMeta.twitter.card,
        site: seomaticMeta.twitter.site,
        creator: seomaticMeta.twitter.creator,
        title: entry.title,
        description: entry.summary,
        image: seomaticMeta.twitter.image
    },
    og: { 
        type: seomaticMeta.og.type,
        locale: seomaticMeta.og.locale,
        url: entry.url,
        title: entry.title,
        description: entry.summary,
        image: seomaticMeta.og.image,
        site_name: seomaticMeta.og.site_name,
        see_also: seomaticMeta.og.see_also
    }
} %}

Put that in your blog template that extends your layout.twig (or whatever) that has the {% hook 'seomaticRender' %} in it, and it'll "just work", override all of your other meta.

I realize it's not ideal, but it's the easiest way to handle it on a site where you're retrofitting SEOmatic, as opposed to integrating it from the start.

from seomatic.

Ok, thanks for explaining the problem – and for the implementation tip. I really appreciate it 👍

from seomatic.

Hm :)

{% set seomaticMeta = seomaticMeta | merge({
  twitter: {
    image: previewImages[2].url
  }
}) %}

This works outside the {% block foo %} but when I set it within this block it doesn't work.
Any Ideas?

from seomatic.

@davidhellmann Yes, you'll need to do that outside of the {% block %} statements due to the way that Twig's processing order works:

https://straightupcraft.com/articles/twig-processing-order

Otherwise, you'll be setting the SEOmatic variables after the meta tags have already been rendered (so it won't do anything, effectively).

Also, you'll need do do the full array otherwise the other fields will get blown away, due to the way the Twig (poorly, imo) handles setting of arrays:

{% set seomaticMeta = seomaticMeta | merge({
    twitter: {
        card: seomaticMeta.twitter.card,
        site: seomaticMeta.twitter.site,
        creator: seomaticMeta.twitter.creator,
        title: entry.title,
        description: entry.summary,
        image: previewImages[2].url
    }
}) %}

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