Show Thread Enhancements - Facebook / Open Graph (og:description) / (og:title) tag fixes for VB 4.1.10+ by BOP5

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5 / Qapla.com.

For some reason vBulletin 4.x does not use the thread's meta description when populating the open graph "description" tag that is read by Facebook and other social networking sites. Instead by default vBulletin uses your site default meta description that is set in Admin CP -> Settings -> Options -> Site Name / URL / Contact Details.

This default description is usually very generic whereas the thread description is the first few sentences of the thread and therefore usually far more useful to describe the page actually being shared than your generic site description.

Also even with the Facebook Platform enabled vBulletin doesn't provide an open graph title tag at all- while in practice this isn't a big deal as Facebook will default to the page title, as a matter of good practice it should be explicitly provided.

This mod fixes both issues. It will override the generic description with the thread's meta description which is based on the text of the first post. It also adds an explicit og:title tag.

New In Version 1.2.0 - The mod now also greatly improves the open graph tag description tag for blog entries. By default the description tag is the blog title followed by the username of the blog poster. With this mod the description becomes up to a 300 character preview of the actual blog entry instead. And the open graph title tag provided takes the form of blog title Posted By username.

Blog Demo: http://www.totallycommercials.com/en...ckbuster-Video
Thread Demo: http://www.totallycommercials.com/sh...how-Commercial
(View page source or better yet, share on Facebook to see the differences. )

This mod is only for people with VB 4.1.10 or higher and only if you have the Facebook Platform enabled in your settings. It will do nothing if both of those do not apply to you.

There are no settings- just install the product and the mod is active.

To see the difference use the Facebook Debugger to look at the content scraped off a thread page before and after instillation-
Facebook Debugger is here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

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Please "Mark as Installed" if you use this.
Donations always appreciated. :up:
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[mykkal]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

Are you sure? This mod just adds more details to the open graph tags in the header (doesn't add sharing options...) and those tags do indeed work in the mobile style on my test site.

Example random link to a random thread and mobile style: http://www.qapla.com/mods/showthread...but?styleid=13

If you look at the source of the page all the og tags are there with the relevant title and descriptions.

Maybe you are thinking of my More Sharing Options TNG mod?

Yes I was... i apologize. I will immediately post in the thread for that thread.

[Crispin Proctor]

This did not work for me as it conflicted with another plugin (VsaBanners). I see other's had the same problem but with other plugins.

The fault is not with this plugin but with the other plugins which use globacl_start as hook and call vB_Template::Create. This causes the template to rerender which then breaks things.

Seeing as global_start is depreciated the tip was to change the bad plugin to use parse_templates which I did and everything worked!


thanks for the plugin - makes for better OG details.

[elsa23]

Hi, for this topic :
http://forum-elodiefrege.com/mediath...ai-2017-a.html

og:description become :

<meta property="og:description" content="ELLE.fr : L'interview beaut? / Dans le dressing? d#8217;Elodie Fr?g? --- Mai 2017 -----" />

instead of:

<meta property="og:description" content="ELLE.fr : L'interview beaut? / Dans le dressing d'Elodie Fr?g? --- Mai 2017 -----" />

How to fix that please

(see attachment please or directly on my link because it does not paste correctly here)

[BirdOPrey5]

I'm sorry but I don't have any way to test on non-English languages. The functions used likely aren't multibyte character compatible.

[elsa23]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I'm sorry but I don't have any way to test on non-English languages. The functions used likely aren't multibyte character compatible.

I reactivated english language, you can take a look please

[BirdOPrey5]

Hello,

I am sorry, you misunderstand. Whether English is enabled or not is not the issue. The problem is this mod is just not compatible when content uses non-English or multibyte characters.