Extra Attributes.... use them for meta tags?

03/2-09 at 02.51 by: Robert Campbell

In CMS Made Simple 1.5 (or something) we added a few extra properties to the various content types.... extra1, extra2, and extra3.... Some people have been asking 'what are these for?'... well the simple answer is 'anything you want'.

You can use them for pretty much anything. I have usedthem in conjunction with the FrontEndUsers and CustomContent modules to list groups that are allowed to view specific pages. I've used them to display images on pages (before I added the image and thumbnail properties).... there are lots of ways you can use thise fields... they are just generic properties for a page.

But what about meta tags? Why not use those fields to provide some additional meta tag information.... Maybe you don't want google to index this page.... well lets try to use the extra2 field to handle that.

Try this.

Enter this text into the 'extra2' field (on the options tab) when editing a page: noindex (be careful with whitespace).

Then, in your page template (in the area between <head> and </head>) you should be able to do something like:

{capture assign='robots'}{$content_obj->GetPropertyValue('extra2')}{/capture}

This will process that content (the stuff inside the tags, and assign it to the smarty variable 'robots'. (I'll explain later what $content_obj is).

Next, you can use something like:

{if !empty($robots)}<meta name="robots" value="{$robots}">{/if}

Save your page template, and refresh the appropriate page. When you view the page source, you should see something like:

<meta name="robots" value="noindex">

Now google shouldn't index that page... or any page that have that value set in the 'extra2' property in the options tab.

Now you know one way (and there are many) that you can use the extra attributes that are associated with each content item in your page content.

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