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One Layout, Many Pages, Many TITLEs

If I want to use one layout, what is the best way to conditionalize or vary the META tags within the layout?

I saw this in the documentation - where do you use it?

2. <title>$!content.title</title>

A $content represents the page that the user is looking at. For example /index.html would be a content page. The layout will pull the title for a page from a property in the xconf files. The property needs to be named "title" for example:
<property name="title">Welcome!</property>

Thank you.

Place the title tag in the <head> </head> section of your page as normal. You can/should also add stuff like:

Then you will be able to use the property editor to set those values on a page per page basis. If you set the title property in the main root level _site.xconf it will trickle down to every page - you can override it by setting it on a lower level folder or an individual page.

anonymous Tue, Feb 10, 9:03 AM

Unfortunately, I still don't see how this use of $!content works. If you put the value in _site.xconf, it's global. I want individual meta tags for each page (for SEO and reasonable context). The way the developer originally created the page, ALL the <head></head> info is in the template layout. How do you structure the pages when you have a typical site HTML format:

<head>

<title>

</head>

<body>

</body>

Scott Herring Sat, Mar 14, 1:49 PM

Hey - this was a while ago - but the answer is that pages only inherit stuff from the global _site.xconf - so for example, if you had a _site.xconf at the root level with:

<property name="title">Welcome!</property>

and a file called about.html that you wanted a different title for, you'd add a file called about.xconf, in the same folder, and add

<property name="title">Welcome to the about page</property>

Then, every page in the site would have "welcome!" as the title except the about page. You can use this to great advantage as you can specificy this at the folder level - so _site.xconf at the root level is the default, but if you had a folder called /faqs/ you could create a file called /faqs/_site.xconf and add <property name="title">Welcome to the faq section!</property> - all files in that folder would use the title property from there.

This may seem like a bit of work, but the property editor handles it for you. Choose "page settings" and fill in the blanks - voila, new meta tags.

Ian Miller (IJ_Solutions) Wed, Jul 22, 7:11 PM

Unfortunately, Google doesn't rank pages well that share common sets of META tags. For years, they didn't even bother with them, and now they do - but in a way that can hurt your site. The best thing is to not repeat descriptions across any pages. The solution was a separate XCONF for every page. Oh, well...