TotalCMS and RW8 social tags

Hi all,

I upgraded to RW8 and I’m trying to implement the social tags for Facebook and Twitter. On a basic page it works fine, however, I’m using TotalCMS as a blog and that is causing some issues.
FYI, I am using the Facebook Open Graph Object Debugger to check the meta tags being created and then verifying by viewing the page source.

What I’m seeing is that my original URL, https://airportguide.com/blog/post/john-travolta-and-his-real-passion-flying , is incorrectly being written for Facebook as

and for Twitter as

You can see that the permalink page name is being stripped off in favor of the Blog Post physical page named index.php.

Does anyone know if the RW8 social tags will work with a TotalCMS Blog? If it won’t, then does anyone know of a way to turn them off in RW8 so I can manually enter them in the HEAD section using the TotalCMS Macros?

Thanks,
Mike

EDIT I also see that the og:type tag is “website”. Shouldn’t that be changed to “article” for a blog? How do you do that in RW8?

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@joeworkman might answers those.?As I think the social network support is one of the best improvements (of many) in RW8 @dan should have a look as well…

I believe the TotalCms Blog generates its own tags for the blog article page

Correct. There are settings in the Blog Post stack for it to automatically add meta tags to the page.

Didn’t see an option to turn off the RW8 social tags, has anyone else found that? If you’ve already have them in a RW7 project, (manually or foundations SEO helper) or addons that generate them.

I don’t think you want duplicates as meta tags aren’t like CSS there’s only supposed to be one of each of theses, no rules as to which one the social site would use.

@joeworkman I figured that TotalCMS would handle this. Now I just need to figure out how to turn off RW8 on my TotalCMS blog pages and I’ll be set.

@teefers What I’m seeing now is that RW is setting an og:type of “website” and the Blog Post stack sets the og:type as “article” . I’m thinking you may be right about only having one og:type on the web page…unless Facebook has some logic where it understands the article type is within the website type. I doubt it’s that smart though.

@dan Any thoughts on this? The web page as a whole can be considered part of the web site like RW currently does BUT a blog post should be recognized as an article as Joe’s TotalCMS Blog Post stack currently does.

Not just the open graph type, but any OG tag should not be duplicated. If you have two different og:image tags on a page which one will Facebook use? The might use the first and stop looking or they might keep looking and end up with the last. Since there’s only supposed to be one what they do today could change tomorrow. And don’t forget open graph is intended to be used by others not just FB.

Shouldn’t you simply delete the contents for these fields in the page inspector?

I believe they default to site wide tags. There’s an option under advanced to turn off the social tags, but that will turn them off project wide(not at the page level).
Not at a Mac now so can’t test.

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I believe that would only work for the tags shown. For example, another issue I just noticed is that RW8 is messing up my og:url social tag as well. From the Facebook object debugger, I am seeing duplicate tags for og:url, og:type, and og:image as seen in the attached image. I can get rid of the duplicate image tag by not populating the inspector field with the image but I have no way of fixing the url and type tags since they seem to be hardwired to the hard-coded folder/filename in the inspector.

RW should definitely find a way to exclude pages from the social features or have override fields for the default settings since the duplicate og:url tags and type will probably occur not only in TotalCMS but on any page that uses a redirect from the hardcoded name, i.e., dynamic data-driven pages. This can cause havoc when Facebook or twitter need to determine which one to trust.

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So you don’t have anything set in the meta tag section in site wide code or in the page inspector?

Here is a screenshot of what’s in my inspector. You can see in the Social Tags area that I have a Title (og:title) and Description (og:description), NO picture since I use Other Tags to specify og:image based on the featured image in the post. The blank Meta Tag for og:description was a mistake on my part since there is no blogSummary on the Post page.
The real issue is the duplicate og:type and og:url tags as there is no way to override them or specify which one you want. You can see they don’t exist in the Inspector so this is definitely an RW8 issue. They should list all of the tags with checkboxes to disable (or override) the sitewide tags. RW8 is treating every web page like it’s static.

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@dan perhaps you can have a look?

Per @joeworkman request, I took everything out of my page inspector and here is what I’m now seeing which is not good.
URL of page: John Travolta and His Real Passion... Flying

But look at all of the social tags generated below. It’s for AirportGuide Blog which is my main blog page, not the post

<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Airport Guide">
<meta property="og:title" content="Airport Guide Blog">
<meta property="og:description" content="Airplanes, airports, flying, travel... We discuss everything aviation in the Airport Guide Blog.">
<meta property="og:image" content="/resources/aerial-view-over-river-1000x295.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://airportguide.com/blog/index.php">

And the attached image is what the facebook object debugger sees which verifies it is reading the incorrect page based on the meta tags. Maybe it has to do with the rewrites in the htaccess file for TotalCMS serving the correct page on the web site but RW doesn’t have access to it? If this is true then I need to be able to disable TW social tags for that one page.


On top of those macros do you also have the setting in the Blog post stack to insert meta tags?

In the project General settings, try turning off Generate Social Tags

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That fixed it! So until RW gives the option to turn off social tags by page, I think the workaround will have to be publish pages with Social Tags on and then publish the Blog Post page with Social Tags off.
That’s a bit tedious but it should work. You just have to remember to turn it back on when publishing the other pages.
Thanks for all your help and I look forward to seeing if RW can address this.

Yes, all Blog Post stack Meta Tags are enabled.

The problem I see here is the New RW generated Social Media Tags, are an all or nothing thing. Turning them off “globally” for an add-on blog turns them off for all pages in the project.
@dan Can you look at adding a checkbox to enable/disable Social Media at the page level in a future update?

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If you have blog post meta tags enabled in the Blog Post stack, then you should not put the macros into the page inspector. You are doubling everything that way.