at this point, not much I can do without access to what is going on… have been testing yoast/genesis/simple press and other wp themes tonight…  all seem to work fine with the title – certainly not getting extra output like that…

couple more shots in the dark… 

what happens ifyou go to forum – options – general settings and turn off the page title generation there?

what options do you have set on forum – integration – page and permalink for the integration display settings?  might try having display multiple off and display in loop on… and maybe the strict wp api option…

barring that, would need to get a closer look and do some debugging…

what happens ifyou go to forum – options – general settings and turn off the page title generation there?

If you mean forum > options >general display settings > and click on “Remove page title completely”, that’s what I have already.

what options do you have set on forum – integration – page and permalink for the integration display settings?  might try having display multiple off and display in loop on… and maybe the strict wp api option…

I’ve tried as you said, and many other combinations, and none worked. I can’t remember how it was initially set at this point.

Barring that, would need to get a closer look and do some debugging…

I’m happy to give you an admin account.

BUT…THIS MIGHT BE IMPORTANT: I tried disabling the Yoast SEO plugin and the topic pages then showed the proper browser titles!! The forum display showed just the URL as the title, but at least getting the topic displays working was progress.  So, doesn’t that seem like the problem is something with Yoast SEO, not Catalyst?

well, lets start with an admin account, sure… in the end, may need ftp access to actually put in some debug code…  but let me take a look at the various set ups first…

pm the details to me (and yellow swordfish) and please link back to this topic…

please be advised, tomorrow is a very busy day for me as is Monday AM…  might be Monday afternoon or night before I get any serious time to look at… but will do so…

Okay, I did something radical to move this along. After seeing last night that disabling Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin caused most things to work right, this morning I used the SEO Data Transporter plugin to move all my Yoast SEO settings to the built-in Catalyst theme SEO settings. Then I disabled Yoast’s SEO plugin. Goodbye. Catalyst has great SEO ability so I can live without Yoast if it helps me get SP working right. (I know the Yoast plugin is working for most everyone else, but obviously there is some issue with it for my site.)

SO, now that Yoast is disabled and I am using Catalyst’s built-in SEO, it’s all working.

I do have one question still:  I have the “page name” showing on all the browser titles (setting on “Include page name in page/browser title”).  I would love to NOT have this show on the topic page title. But I don’t see a setting for this. I’ve set ON “Exclude forum name in page/browser title on topic views only” on to remove the forum name from the topic view, but i don’t see a way to remove the Page Name from the topic view.  Is there a way to do this? I just want a clean Topic Name for the browser title on a topic view.

If there is no way to do this, may I suggest one more option on the SP SEO page?  Right after “Exclude forum name in page/browser title on topic views only” add “Exclude page name in page/browser title on topic views only.” Seems like this would be something others might like too.

As always, thanks for all your help.

lol, we have too many options already!   but I can add it to the list…

with too many unique customizations, but be best to just use our filter and make it what you want…

I would have loved to see what catalyst was doing in the headers just to see… but glad its working…

Yes, but SEO should really be able to be fine tuned. For example, the reason I want just the topic title only is a) if a title is over 60-72 characters in length, Google can and often doesn’t just truncate but now REWRITES your title. So the shorter the better in the first place, and b) My site name is my main keyword (3D printer) and having it on too many pages is not something Google particularly likes, figures I’m stuffing my keyword in all the page titles to game things.  

You said, “best to just use our filter and make it what you want.” Can you tell me where I can learn more about that, please? I don’t know anything about that. And I really want to get the page name off of my topic view title.

I’ve got a suggestion for the SEO page that will offer complete flexibility, but I’ll wait to see what you say about the filter you spoke of, and then suggest it in the Feature Requests forum.

And yes, I could have stuck with the setup that wasn’t working for you to debug, but I figured you were already spending too much time on this already, and I don’t want to end up being one of those customers that’s always bugging you. I hope to be done with all my newbie questions very, very soon, and then quit bothering you.

how filters and hooks work in wp (and sp): http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API

you use hooks to do something when someone signals an event has occurred…

you use filters to adjust the value of something that has just been determined… so using a filter, you can replace the determined value with your own value…

in this case, wp fires the ‘wp_title’ filter to allow themes/plugins to adjust the title… so of course there can be contention… priorities help there… after we hook into that wp filter, we adjust the title as needed… before we return it, we fire our own ‘sph_browser_title’ filter to allow folks to change what we just did…

Excellent. I’ll look into it. Catalyst makes it easy to do hooks and filters — I’ve done many hooks, but no filters.  I’ll figure it out.  I’m assuming then I can write some PHP if statements that test whether it’s a topic view or not and then apply a filter to wp_title.

But would I do the filter where I do hooks and filters in Catalyst, at that level, or do them in one of the SP plugin files?

I’ll search to see if there are any examples of filtering wp_title here on the forum.

If things ever get dicey, I can always hire to your create what I need I assume.

Going to switch from my Silver level to Gold today.

yes of course, we do custom plugins for simple press too…  this one would be quite simple… but try it first…

yes, some php code…  since its local to SP, I would put it in my spFunctions.php file…

take a look at sp_setup_browser_title()… thats our routine where we determine it… you will see it calls sp_setup_title() which does all the page and option based adjustments…  you could instead tie into its filter ‘sph_page_title’ if you wanted to affect more than meta and browser title

Thank you.  Is there any way to create a mod like that and have it survive SP updates? Or would I reapply it every time?

if you dont modify core, but make a plugin or put it in the spFunctions.php file of your theme (one you created from ours as a base), it will be unaffected by SP updtes…

Hi guys,

I’m using the same set of software (Catalyst, WP SEO, Simple:Press) and experienced exactly the same problems slobizman encountered.  I found the combination of settings that was able to make use of the suggested fixes by Mr Papa, however you have to make the following changes to that part that fixes the browser title:

1.  Instead of

add_filter('wp_title', 'sp_setup_browser_title', 99, 3);

Use:

add_filter('wp_title', 'sp_setup_browser_title', 19, 3);

That’s because Catalyst calls add_filter(‘wp_title’, …) with its own function that optionally wraps the title then outputs it, using priority number 20 (line 53 of catalyst-header.php).  I’m not a PHP/WP programmer so I can’t say this with certainty but I kinda figured S:P needs to do its thing on the page title before the theme actually outputs it.  Just not sure what other filters are applied between the default ’10’ and ’19’.  I got the idea to search where Catalyst outputs the title when I read this woman’s alternate (non-Catalyst) solution:

http://bonplangratos.fr/forum/bon-plan-entre-geeks/yoast-wordpress-seo-how-to-display-title-of-your-simplepress-post

Then I also applied the custom function described earlier to fix the canonical entries and it worked.

I’d like to request some guidance on how I could make the change I made survive a Simple:Press update.  Thanks!

OK – I admin it… I am hoping I don’t have to read the 41 posts before yours to get a handle on your question and that you really ARE just asking about preserving theme changes.

And if that is right then we recommend that you create your own SP theme so that any customisation is not lost during a future update. (http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/)

Of course we do – from time to time – need to make a theme change but these are documented with qach release and we do try and minimise these as much as possible.

I already am using my own SP theme which I made following the instructions on how to derive one from the existing ones.

The add_filter() code in my previous post was supposed to have been a fix Mr. Papa made to the SP core’s future release (inside sp-load-forum.php) which I just modified here to work on Catalyst Theme, by changing the parameter 99 to 19.  Mr. Papa’s original post is here:

https://simple-press.com/support-forum/sp5-general-topics/does-yoast-seo-wordpress-plugin-work-with-simple-press/page-2/#p125578

My specific question then is: How do I make the equivalent of that add_filter() code part of my custom SP theme instead of being part of the core?  Sorry I’m not a WP/PHP programmer — I do have a rough grasp of the WP loop and the concept of hooks and filters, but not enough to really figure out how to do it.

I imagine I must add something like this to spFunctions.php of my custom theme:

The thing is I’m sure I’m missing a lot — like how to reverse the original add_filter() call in the core to make sure this is the one that applies, as well as where I should hook my custom function.  Am I making sense?

Ah. Understand. I think.
I assume he was intending that the original in-core filter be removed in favour of this one but the best thing I can do is probably ask him so please bear with me…