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Meta Descriptions for WordPress

c.bavota — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 05:30:44 +0000

A very important thing to pay attention to when optimizing your site for search engine ranking is creating unique pages meta descriptions for all of the pages on your website that you want to have indexed. If you take a look on Google, or any search engine, you will see a blurb about your page beneath the page title. This little bit of text is taken for the text your page has in the meta description tag. No text, no blurb on Google, and possibly no indexing whatsoever.

Page description in Google

Having a unique title for each page is important, but what is more important is making sure that the description for your page is just as unique and relevant. The great thing about WordPress is that you can use some basic functions to put together a little script that would create a meta description dynamically for each of your pages.

I encountered a few issues trying to put this script together due to the fact that some plugins actually hook into the_content() or the_excerpt() and this causes a lot of issues. The final solution I came up with is below. Just add the following to your functions.php file within the PHP tags:

function dynamic_meta_description() {
	$rawcontent = 	get_the_content();
	if(empty($rawcontent)) {
		$rawcontent = htmlentities(bloginfo('description'));
	} else {
		$rawcontent = apply_filters('the_content_rss', strip_tags($rawcontent));
		$rawcontent = preg_replace('/\[.+\]/','', $rawcontent);
		$chars = array("", "\n", "\r", "chr(13)",  "\t", "\0", "\x0B");
		$rawcontent = htmlentities(str_replace($chars, " ", $rawcontent));
	}
	if (strlen($rawcontent) < 155) {
		echo $rawcontent;
	} else {
		$desc = substr($rawcontent,0,155);
		return $desc;
	}
}

This little script grabs the raw content using get_the_content(), then it applies some filters and removes shortcodes, tags and line breaks. Once that is done, it limits the description to 155 characters if it is too long. Finally it returns the description, formatted exactly how you need it to be.

Next all we need to do is add a line to the header.php between the head tags.

 echo dynamic_meta_description(); ?>" />

If a meta description line already exists, you can replace it with this.

Now all of your pages will have a unique meta description, and those that don’t will have your default site description, which you set up in your wp-admin under your General Settings.

Simple Voting for WordPress with PHP and jQuery

c.bavota — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:58:03 +0000

This tutorial is no longer up-to-date. Please check out A Better Voting System for WordPress for a more secure and efficient approach.

I needed to create a simple way for site members to vote on a post and the few scripts I found didn’t really work how I needed them to. So I decided to whip something together myself. I developed a pretty basic script using PHP and jQuery to allow members who are signed in to click on a simple link to add their vote to a post.

First you need to add this to your header.php file between the tags. If you notice that you already have the call somewhere else in your header.php file, just delete it.



<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
jQuery(".vote a").click(
function() {
var some = jQuery(this);
var thepost = jQuery(this).attr("post");
var theuser = jQuery(this).attr("user");
jQuery.post("/vote.php", {user: theuser, post: thepost}, 
function(data) {
var votebox = ".vote"+thepost+" span";
jQuery(votebox).text(data);
jQuery(some).replaceWith('Voted');
});
});
});	
script>

When a member clicks on the vote link, the above code will get the post ID and the member’s user ID and send it to a file called vote.php using a post method. The vote.php file will perform everything we need to add the vote.

So let’s create a file called vote.php and add it to your theme’s directory.


$file = dirname(__FILE__);
$file = substr($file, 0, stripos($file, "wp-content") );
 
require( $file . "/wp-load.php");
 
$currentvotes = get_post_meta($_POST['post'], 'votes', true);
$currentvotes = $currentvotes + 1;
 
$voters = get_post_meta($_POST['post'], 'thevoters', true);
if(!$voters) $voters = $_POST['user']; else $voters = $voters.",".$_POST['user'];
 
update_post_meta($_POST['post'], 'votes', $currentvotes);
update_post_meta($_POST['post'], 'thevoters', $voters);
 
echo $currentvotes;
?>

Once the information is posted to vote.php two custom fields are created. One to count the vote and one to add the voter to a list so that they can’t vote again.

Add the code below to your functions.php file, or create a functions.php file if your theme does not have one.

// voting function
function voting($id) {
global $user_ID;
$currentvotes = get_post_meta($id, 'votes', true);
$voters = get_post_meta($id, 'thevoters', true);
$voters = explode(",", $voters);
foreach($voters as $voter) {
	if($voter == $user_ID) $alreadyVoted = true;
}
 
if(!$currentvotes) $currentvotes = 0;
echo '.$id.'">'.$currentvotes.'';
if($user_ID && !$alreadyVoted) echo '
.$id.'" user="'.$user_ID.'">'.__("Vote").'';
if($user_ID && $alreadyVoted) echo '
'.__("Voted").'';
echo '
';
if(!$user_ID) echo '.get_bloginfo('url').'/wp-login.php?action=register">'.__('Register').' '.__('to vote').'.
';
}

Let’s add some CSS to style our voting box.

.vote {
	padding: 5px 0;
	background: #eee;
	border: 1px solid #ddd;
	width :50px;
	text-align: center;
	margin: 10px auto;
	}
 
	.vote a, .vote span.voted {
		cursor: pointer;
		margin-top: 5px;
		padding-top: 5px;
		border-top: 1px solid #ddd;
		display: block;
		}
 
	.vote span.voted {
		cursor: default;
		}

Now all you need to do is add the following within the WordPress loop to have the voting box appear.

 voting($post->ID); ?>

Test it out below:

0
Vote

Remove the WordPress Generator

c.bavota — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:45:41 +0000

WordPress automatically places a line of text between your tags which states the version you currently have installed. I have read that it is there for statistical reasons which is all fine and dandy, but sometimes showing off which version of WP you are using lets hackers know exactly what vulnerabilities your site has.

For security reasons, I suggest removing the generator, and doing so only takes one line of code.

The WordPress generator line looks like this:

To get rid of it, open up your functions.php file. It is located in your theme’s folder. If there is no functions.php file, create one and just add the following code.

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

Be sure to place it between tags.

Using WP_Query to Fetch Posts in WordPress

c.bavota — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:00:02 +0000

I was just putting together a WordPress widget for a client and I came across a small road block. I was using to set the loop to act the way I needed it to but when the widget loaded up in the left sidebar, it caused some issues when going to a category page. The problem was the query I initialized in the sidebar was carrying over to the main section. I couldn’t figure out what to do until I stumbled up the wp_query function.

It works in a similar way to query_post but you need to do a few minor things to get it to work properly.


$featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
$featuredPosts->query('showposts=5&cat=3');
while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post(); ?>
 the_permalink() ?>"> the_title(); ?>

By  the_author() ?>


 the_excerpt(); ?>

 endwhile; ?>

First you need to setup the query.

$featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
$featuredPosts->query('showposts=5&cat=3');

Then you need to setup the loop.

while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post(); ?>
     (stuff goes here)
 endwhile; ?>

So in the end it looks something like this.


$featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
$featuredPosts->query('showposts=5&cat=3');
while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post(); ?>
 the_permalink() ?>"> the_title(); ?>

By  the_author() ?>


 the_excerpt(); ?>

 endwhile; ?>

What this will do is get 5 posts from category 3 and list them, without interfering with other loops or queries on your site.