Meta title and description via ACF

• YorlinqNL

• January 13, 2022 at 2:42 pm

I have a fully working code to collect the data of 2 meta fields (title and description) on all pages in case the auto generated meta is not suitable. It works on every page exact 2:

– The WordPress blog overview (archive)
– The WooCommerce shop page (also archive page)

The 2 ACF fields within the pages look like to be totally ignored.

Any reason for that? And how to overwrite this behavior?

I understand that both pages are like kinda system pages where I can’t directly edit the content but I do want to edit the generated meta data.

Here’s the working code (except for the 2 archive pages):

// Add social media friendly meta tags
function yl_add_meta_tags_to_wp_head() {

	setup_postdata( $post );

	$custom_meta_title			= get_field('yl_meta_title' );
	$custom_meta_description	= get_field( 'yl_meta_description' );

	if ($custom_meta_title) {
		$meta_title = $custom_meta_title;
	} else {
		$meta_title = get_the_title();
	}

	if ($custom_meta_description) {
		$meta_description = $custom_meta_description;
	} else {
		$meta_description = substr(wp_strip_all_tags(get_the_excerpt()),0,150) . '...';
	}

	if ( class_exists( 'woocommerce' ) && is_product() ) {
		$meta_type = 'product';
	} elseif ( is_single() ) {
		$meta_type = 'article';
	} else {
		$meta_type = 'website';
	}

	echo '
		<meta name="meta_name" content="' . $meta_title . '" />
		<meta name="description" content="' . $meta_description . '" />
	';

}

add_action( 'wp_head', 'yl_add_meta_tags_to_wp_head', 1, 1 );

• jarvis

• January 14, 2022 at 7:35 am

I believe, the archive page title is simply the name of the category or tag.

This post may help

• John Huebner

• January 14, 2022 at 9:59 am

On an archive page get_field(), get_the_excerpt() and get_the_title() will all fail to return any value. These all depends on the global post and on archive pages there isn’t one.

In order to do this you need to have a value stored somewhere, like on an options page or something. Then you need to detect that you are showing an archive page and then get the values you want to set from wherever they are stored.

• YorlinqNL

• January 14, 2022 at 11:13 am

Thanks for explaining John,

I thought it had to be something like that…

I am going for a different approach then.