Re: DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation

ikamiksok — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:49:24 GMT

I had not thought about that since in my website all my pages only have one module each. I would think that a user would not put 2 modules on the same page that would both be writing to the browser title or meta tags.

To accomodate this, perhaps there can be a setting in the module settings for the user to choose "allow module to modify title\meta tags". It would be up to the user to select only one module per page to use this if desired. This way, also, module designers that used these properties to dynamically customize titles or meta tags wouldn't have to write their own admin\options page to enable this option or not.

So, fast forward 6 months, a user would install the new DNN Forums on a page and decide later she wants her forum threads to appear in the browser title. All she would have to do is go to the module settings and check the box enabling this.

This would be my suggestion......

Jason

Re: DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation

cniknet — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 22:13:37 GMT

Hi Jason,

Having page-level properties that can be set at the module level would not be absolute since only the last module loaded on the page would have its changes displayed. Your feature suggestion is good, however I think a different or modified solution may be required.

Nik

DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation

ikamiksok — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:48:03 GMT

This has been mentioned briefly in some posts before, but I would like to suggest this as a core enhancement.

In the PortalModuleBase (was that the name?) that all modules inherit from, it would be nice to have the follow options and have them work within your module:

me.BrowserTitle = "enter dynamic title here"
me.meta.description = "enter dynamic description"
me.meta.keywords = "enter keywords"
me.meta.robots.follow = (true by default)
me.meta.robots.index = (true by default)

I believe there is already an option for changing the title but it does not work as the title & meta tags are already created before you by the time you try to change this property in your code.

For myself, I changed default.aspx.vb to use literal controls for description, title & keywords. This way, when I am in my module code, I can change this dynamically by referring to the literal control name.

For those who think this is a trivial\useless\stupid request (someone told me this was a stupid request awhile back when I was still a newbie on this board and unsure of myself), do some research on SEO techniques or look at how your links display in a search engine. On my site, when spidered, you see for the titles, as an example:
MY SITE > LOCATIONS > Popular Location People Search For
MY SITE > EVENTS > July 4th Fireworks Show in Dallas
MY SITE > FORUMS > Welcome to our new Site
MY SITE > FORUMS > Looking for Used Golf Clubs in Dallas
MY SITE > FORUMS > Dallas Nightlife
So when someone searches for "Dallas Nightlife" rather than see a link for MY SITE > FORUMS they see MY SITE > FORUMS > Dallas Nightlife. Much higher chance for someone to click on that. Also, probably helps me get ranked higher too (I have *great* yahoo rankings since relaunching my site w/ DNN). I also put info on my events or locations in the meta description tags dynamically and so this looks good in search engines too.

And, sometimes you have some pages you don't want search engines to look at. In my case, I have a page which lists up to a 100 usernames with links. Clicking on each takes you to the same "access denied" page. Some search engines don't like too much duplicate content. So I would like to be able to add me.meta.robots.follow=false to my code to keep engines from going to those links.

Anyone's thoughts? For those wanting to do this now, it's a pretty easy, low risk change to the DNN code. All you have to do is modify the default.aspx.vb & default.aspx files. I don't have access to my code now but maybe I'll post it here later if I have time.....

Jason

ps: Also, I think the DNN Subprojects for forums and events should have options to display the thread name and event name in the browser title. This would be cool, huh? So let's make it easy for them with a DNN core feature! :)

DotNetNuke

Re: DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation

Re: DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation

DNN 3.x Add Feature for Dynamic Title & Meta Tag Generation