My first Joomla experience with meta tags

Our client uses jooblog and there was no option to update meta data for the posts. so i needed to update the meta description, keywords and title. But i had no idea how things work in Joomla.

So after googling for a while and trying few options found in the web, the following worked for me.

File: components\com_jb2\views\post\view.html.php

In the function display add the following code anywhere after $post is set.

$doc =& JFactory::getDocument();
if($doc->getTitle() == 'Technooze Blog')
{
    $doc->setTitle(strip_tags($post->Title) . ' – Technooze Blog - technooze.com');
}
$doc->setDescription( substr(strip_tags($post->Text), 0, 156) );
$doc->setMetaData( 'keywords' ,strip_tags($post->Title) .',' . $doc->getMetaData( 'keywords') );

NOTE:

$doc->setMetaData( 'description', substr($post->Text, 0, 156) );

works too but in my case i can't use because of the hacks, as it would generate meta description twice.

That should have probably worked but i found previous hack at: templates\template_name\index.php

Here meta data was hardcoded so, it was same for all blog pages. so i commented out previous and added mine to catch dyanamic data.

if (strpos ($uri, "/blog/") !== FALSE) {
    $desc = $this->getMetaData( 'description');//"Visit the example.com.au Blog.";
    $keywords = $this->getMetaData( 'keywords');//"blog, example, visit";
}

These variables were used at head (if set): libraries\joomla\document\html\renderer\head.php

I used same rules in: components\com_jb2\views\category\view.html.php for category pages.

$doc =& JFactory::getDocument();
if($doc->getTitle() == 'Technooze Blog')
{
    $doc->setTitle($category->CategoryName . ' – Technooze Blog - technooze.com');
}
$doc->setDescription( 'Read blog posts on ' . $category->CategoryName . ' at Technooze Blog.');
$doc->setMetaData( 'keywords' ,$category->CategoryName .',' . $doc->getMetaData( 'keywords') );

Again, same for: components\com_search\views\search\view.html.php

$doc =& JFactory::getDocument();
if($doc->getTitle() == 'Search')
{
    if(!empty($searchword))
    {
        $doc->setTitle(ucwords(strip_tags($searchword)) . ' – Technooze Search - technooze.com');
        $doc->setDescription( 'Search results for ' . (strip_tags($searchword)) . ' on technooze.com');
        $doc->setMetaData( 'keywords', "search, " . strip_tags($searchword) . ", " . $doc->getMetaData( 'keywords') );
    }
    else
    {
        $doc->setTitle('Search – technooze.com');
        $doc->setDescription( 'Search on technooze.com');
        $doc->setMetaData( 'keywords', "search, " . $doc->getMetaData( 'keywords') );
    }
}