Add open graph meta without a plugin

প্রোগ্রামিং 12 months ago 31 Jul, 2019 at 2:15 am 147

Open Graph tags need to be printed in the website header and contain content and technical information about our site, like country, language, title, and image to display on social networks (even different from what we show on site).

So we can use the wp_head hook to add them to WordPress using any theme. Let’s wrap the code up:

add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘fc_opengraph’);

function fc_opengraph() {

if( is_single() || is_page() ) {

$post_id = get_queried_object_id();

$url = get_permalink($post_id);

$title = get_the_title($post_id);

$site_name = get_bloginfo(‘name’);

$description = wp_trim_words( get_post_field(‘post_content’, $post_id), 25 );

$image = get_the_post_thumbnail_url($post_id);

if( !empty( get_post_meta($post_id, ‘og_image’, true) ) ) $image = get_post_meta($post_id, ‘og_image’, true);

$locale = get_locale();

echo ‘<meta property=“og:locale“ content=“‘ . esc_attr($locale) . ‘“ />’;

echo ‘<meta property=“og:type“ content=“article“ />’;

echo ‘<meta property=“og:title“ content=“‘ . esc_attr($title) . ‘ | ‘ . esc_attr($site_name) . ‘“ />’;

echo ‘<meta property=“og:description“ content=“‘ . esc_attr($description) . ‘“ />’;

echo ‘<meta property=“og:url“ content=“‘ . esc_url($url) . ‘“ />’;

echo ‘<meta property=“og:site_name“ content=“‘ . esc_attr($site_name) . ‘“ />’;

if($image) echo ‘<meta property=“og:image“ content=“‘ . esc_url($image) . ‘“ />’;

// Twitter Card

echo ‘<meta name=“twitter:card“ content=“summary_large_image“ />’;

echo ‘<meta name=“twitter:site“ content=“@francecarlucci“ />’;

echo ‘<meta name=“twitter:creator“ content=“@francecarlucci“ />’;

}

view raw fc_opengraph.php hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I run this code on my own site, but is important to highlight some details you may want to understand or change:

I am the only author on my blog, that’s why I use a fixed value for twitter:creator tag
I need tags only on post and pages, but if you run a more complex site with custom post types like products, events, jobs, you will need to to a better use of og:type tag
sometimes I wanna display a different featured image on social media, so I added an og_image custom field but this is not something really needed
if you run a multilingual site, you will need to add some more conditionals to add the og:locale tag

Now you have enough material to start testing code on your site and master your open graphs and social sharing look.

Until next time,
Francesco

12 months ago