#2603 – wrong title and meta description

Hi

One technical reason, if you use tags to insert buttons, is because it's not possible to figure out which meta data belongs to which article when you have 10 articles on page. It would require parsing the page content and recognizing the content and then reading the meta data for each item. Then the even bigger issue is that you would need to find the actual URL for that article, which is not mentioned anywhere. Of course, any such parsing would only work for com_content and would have to be redone for each extension generating content.

If using the Before/After content option to insert buttons, it's a little bit easier as we have more information about the content, no parsing required, but we still have no idea what the actual meta data is.

The title and meta description usually comes from the Menu/category URL

Except if all articles are on the same page, we don't know which menu item is/will be used hen showing the actual article.

Additionally, it's unclear from your description, but it seems you don't want your articles to have a "single page". Which means they don't have an individual URL, which means they cannot be shared on social networks (because, just like search engines, social networks associate one piece of content, including meta data to a single URL. So in all cases, you must have a URL for each article you want to share (or rank in search engines).

Rgds

Hi Again

One thing I realized I didn't mention is that you can workaround this, if you use tags to insert buttons, by specifying the target URL in the tag. This would cause FB and other to look at another page to load meta data instead of the current one. From the social plugin description:

Allow insertion of Social buttons in articles, modules or templates, by replacing the {sh404sef_social_buttons} tag you can add in said content.

You can specify a custom URL like so:
{sh404sef_social_buttons url=index.php?option=com_content&id=12&Itemid=34&view=article} - will be turned to SEF url automatically
{sh404sef_social_buttons url=/my-url.html}
{sh404sef_social_buttons url=http://mysite.com/my-url.html}
{sh404sef_social_buttons url=my-url.html} - will be turned to an absolute url automatically

Rgds

Hi

but it does not work using the non SEF version of the plugin code?

What do you mean? Non-sef version of what?

When I scrape the page using the FB Debugger I get this warning "The 'og:image' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags".

Given I have set the image in the article "Title and meta" I would assume this should not be an issue. Is there a config setting I need to be aware of or is this a bug or programming limitation?

yes, it's a limitation of Facebook. They process images asynchronously and don't they them into account before a few seconds. Just reload the debugger page after 5 seconds, usually it's enough

Rgds