Easy editing meta tags for Publishing Pages with Mavention Meta Fields
Productivity, SEO, SharePoint 2010, Tools, WCMIncluding meta tags for pages on Internet-facing websites is very important. Additional information included in meta tags makes it easier for search engines to find and classify the content. Still many websites either don’t use meta tags at all or don’t provide content editors with a simple mechanism for managing the meta tags making managing the meta tags a one-time process. In many situations meta tags are not even a part of the information architecture for Internet-facing websites and are easily being forgotten in the development process. Additionally, as they are not being displayed on the screen, they are not a part of the branding what makes it challenging for the developers to provide an intuitive editing interface for. Mavention Meta Fields is a turn-key solution that allows you to easily add support for managing page-level meta tags even if your website is almost ready to go on-line.
What is Mavention Meta Fields?
Mavention Meta Fields is a SharePoint solution that allows you to easily add meta tags to Publishing Pages. If you haven’t included meta tags initially as a part of your information architecture or you’re looking for an easy way to add meta tags to Publishing Pages, Mavention Meta Fields is the right solution for you.
Configuring Mavention Meta Fields
Upon deployment Mavention Meta Fields install a Site Collection Feature called Mavention Meta Fields. All you have to do to use Mavention Meta Fields is to activate this single Feature. That’s it. You don’t have to do any changes to your Master Pages or Page Layouts to use Mavention Meta Fields.
In order to use Mavention Meta Fields with your existing Publishing Pages you have to add new columns to your existing Content Types. Those columns will store the contents of meta tags for Publishing Pages. There are two things that you have to consider while adding those columns. First of all the display name of the field determines the name of the meta tag that will be included in your page. Secondly, in order for the field to be picked up by Mavention Meta Fields as a meta tag field, it has to be added to the Publishing Meta Tags group. In my example I’ve added two Site Columns called description and keywords.
Once the columns are in place you have to add them to the Content Types. In this example I’ve added them to the out of the box available Welcome Page Content Type.
And that’s all. You can start using Mavention Meta Fields now.
Editing meta tags with Mavention Meta Fields
When you navigate to a Publishing Page you won’t see much difference. But as soon as you edit the page, the meta tags editor will appear on the right side of the page right under the Status Bar:
After you click the show page metadata link, the edit panel will slide down and you will be able to edit the values for your meta tags:
Once you’re done, save the changes. The meta tags editor will disappear again, but if you view the HTML source of the page you will notice two meta tags added with the values that you have just added using the meta tags editor:
Summary
Mavention Meta Fields is a great solution for managing meta tags for Publishing Pages. Because it doesn’t require you to do any changes to your Master Pages and Page Layouts it’s a great solution for adding meta data to your Publishing Pages even if you haven’t taken it into account while designing the website and its intuitive interface makes it really easy for the content editors to manage the meta tags. Depending on your requirements you might need to include some additional information in the meta tags. Using the Mavention Meta Fields solution you can easily add additional fields by including them in the Publishing Meta Tags groups.
Download: Mavention Meta Fields (31,8KB, WSP)
September 14th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Hi there!
I have installed your feature on a Publishing Site and it works just fine with the OOB masterpages!
However, I would like to make it work with my branded masterpage, based on Randy Drisgills _starter.master (http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/). Is there something that I have to modify? Are there some special html-tags or contentplaceholders that are dependent on your solution?
Please, please advise me further!
Thanks!
September 14th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
@Susanne: the only dependency that I can think off is the AdditionalPageHead Delegate Control but as far as I know it's in Randy's Master Page. Any specific errors that you're getting or you're not seeing the control at all?
September 15th, 2010 at 7:27 am
No specific errors, just not seeing the control.
I have looked at the generated source code, but there is nothing there either, so it's like it isn't generated at all.
September 15th, 2010 at 7:34 am
I tried with a non-modified starter.master from Randy, but the same problem arises. It just doesn't show up when in edit mode.
September 15th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
@Susanne: but everything works correctly when using one of the out of the box Master Pages?
September 15th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Yepp!
September 16th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Hey, I found the problem!!
It seems that Randy's masterpage(and mine also) are missing the .body-wrapper class. I saw that now when I studied the generated script through IE Developer toolbar.
When I applied the class on one of my div's…Voilá!! It is shown and works like a charm!
October 7th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Waldek great stuff, I wanted to understand if this metadata (additional one) will be added as part of the page columns also, correct? Meaning will be added to the PAGES library as well (in the page list columns)?
Also what if there are 5 different content types used in the Page Layouts, and all the 5 need different set of metatags (i.e. one content type needs MetaTag1 and second needs MetaTag2)? Will adding these 2 site columns to the Specific group in site columns and then appropriately adding them to the content type take care of adding the columns and showing only them on specific Pages using that content type?
October 8th, 2010 at 6:02 am
@MOSSBuddy: At this moment it would unfortunately pick up all fields, but you're right: it should only pick up fields associated with the specific Content Type. I will be releasing a new version soon which will have this issue fixed. Thanks for the great feedback!
October 8th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
For some reason the edit meta panel failed to show up on our site which uses a custom master page. We did start with Randy's Master page and inserting the .body-wrapper class didn't help.
Here is an alternative yet simple solution for those interested. Insert the below in the header section of your master page:
source: http://bit.ly/99pxnf
October 8th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Thank you Waldek, you are awesome. You are a great community guy and lots of folks should learn from you hw to spread the knowledge…thanks again.
October 22nd, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Thanks Waldek for such nice SEO thing.I have couple of Question first one there is already keywords Column under Core Document Columns so i can pick anyother name second i have some custom content type as u know all of them should inherit from Page content type so instead of adding this two columns in all content type can i add only in page content type and then all other content type will inherit them.
Please advise
October 24th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
@Ronak: Using a different column for the Keywords is not a problem with Mavention Meta Fields. By default Mavention Meta Fields uses the Field's *display* name to render the meta tag so you can create your own Field with a unique Internal Name and then give it the Keywords display name so that it will result in the desired meta tag.
As for the second question, I haven't checked it myself, but wouldn't the Fields defined in the parent Content Type appear as a part of your Content Type, meaning you should be able to use them without any extra work?
October 24th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Thanks for Reply yes can i use fields from parent content type in page Layouts so i think adding them in Page content type will work let me try and will give you feedback…
January 12th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
This is a great feature that we indeed can benefit from. We are experiencing one issue though. We are not able to create site columns with name 'description' and 'keywords' because they already exists. We have created columns with different names but are not able to change the display name. Neither via SharePoint Designer nor via Site Settings.
Do we miss something?
January 12th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
@Soren: As I mentioned in the article you cannot create another Description field since there is already one available out of the box. You should however be able to rename the field after creating it. Are you getting any errors?
January 12th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
@Waldek: No, we are not getting any errors. And we can change the site column display names manually for each folder.
Let me go a little bit more into details with our case:
We have an internet facing site with numerous subsites. More subsites are being added over time. We would like SEO meta tags on all our pages in every Pages folder in every site. Existing as well as coming ones.
Up until now we have configured everything as specified in the article. We have created two columns with our own name specified, placed them in the Publishing Meta Tags group and added them to our content type. We can see the meta tags fields when editing a page. We can also manually change the site column display names to whatever we want (so far so good) but this is not an acceptable solution. This should preferably be done automatically.
Should we script our way through this? And run the script automatically every day from now on? Or is there another way we can skip the manual part changing site column display names?
January 14th, 2011 at 7:31 am
@Soren: You should be able to create custom fields using a Feature as well. The trick is to use a unique InternalName and the Description/Keywords DisplayName. By putting those fields in the Publishing Meta Tags group and adding them to your Content Types you should be able to get this done automatically.
January 18th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Hello, Waldek.
I could not put the feature to run.
I followed the steps bellow:
- Installed the WSP package
- Activated the feature on the site collection
- Created two new site columns
- Put these new columns on the group "Publishing Meta Tags"
- Added the site columns from the group Publishing Meta Tags on the content types of the site pages.
When editing the pages, I cannot see the link "show page metadata".
I'm using a brand new site collection, without any customizations, created just for this test.
Do you know what can be wrong?
Thanks.
January 18th, 2011 at 5:01 pm
@Felipe: are you using standard or a custom Master Page?
January 18th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
@Waldek: I'm using the standard Master Page.
My SharePoint version is:
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 version 14.0.4763.1000
(Portuguese – Brazil)
January 21st, 2011 at 12:55 am
deployed the solution and created the columns…unfortunately, I have to go to every Pages library in every site in my site collection, to rename the displayname for the site column (which I had to name as metadescription and metakeywords).
I have 2 columns which I use to populate text and hyperlink on a visual element of the home page (this is a public site), but when I add the meta columns to the pages library, the content for those columns doesn't get rendered on the page. Any ideas? Maybe a js or css conflict??
January 21st, 2011 at 6:17 am
@Thiago: Did you add the field to the Publishing Meta Tags group as mentioned in the article? If so, could you confirm that you don't have any JavaScript errors?
January 21st, 2011 at 9:18 am
@Thiago: Next time create your site columns with a Powershell script then your are able to name them correctly from the start (description and keywords).
January 21st, 2011 at 4:54 pm
@Waldek I did add the site columns to the group as described, and I get the edit boxes for the columns when editing the page, and after saving, I see the rendered meta tags when viewing the html source.
However, my 2 other columns which render styled text on the page no longer render. I went back into the Pages library and manually deleted the 2 meta columns, and refreshed my page and that brings back rendering of my 2 columns. It's bizarre. I'll dig through JS and CSS to see if there are errors or conflicts going on.
January 26th, 2011 at 9:49 pm
How do I change the DisplayName of the site column? I get the following error when I try to rename it to "description"
"The column name that you entered is already in use or reserved. Choose another name."
Side note: Why did you not implement some sort of prefix that you filter out when you render the meta tag. Something like "MV-description". Check for "MV-" and remove it when you render the meta tag. Then we could all avoid this issue. After all, the most important meta tag for us to add is the description, which always already exists out of the box. Just my two cents.
January 26th, 2011 at 10:14 pm
@Nate: In my scenario I provisioned the fields using a Feature but you have definitely a valid point, especially if you want to make this easier to content authors. Thank you for the feedback.
January 26th, 2011 at 10:34 pm
@Waldek You can still use the Feature, just make it so we can create a column name that exists already by allowing us to prepend it with a token that we know will not be output into the markup.
I have installed the feature, activated it, added the new site column and added that column to my page content type. I had to add the css class of "body-wrapper" to my custom master template and change my stylesheet to override the styles associated with it in order to get your form to display. Since we can't change the javascript in your solution, I recommend you change how the editpanel is added to the DOM. It is much less likely that a developer creating a custom template would remove pageStatusBar element than they would be to remove the .body-wrapper class. I believe that it would be a good solution if you were to change your javascript to prepend the panel like so:
$("#pageStatusBar").parent().css("padding-top", "0").prepend($("#mv-metaeditpanel"));
Both suggestions I have made would make things easier for content authors as well as save steps for developers (sharepoint wastes enough of my time).
I still don't know how to successfully change the DisplayName of the column. Do I have to use Power Shell? If so, I am pretty new to using Power Shell and I don't know the commands. Could someone help me?
January 27th, 2011 at 12:17 am
@Waldek do you think that it might be a problem if my master page already registers a jQuery script (v1.4.3) at the top of the page, and then you try to add another script reference to an earlier version of jQuery??
How about changing MetaFieldsEditor.OnInit(), so that you leverage the ScriptLink control (see http://cglessner.blogspot.com/2010/08/sharepoint-scripts-on-demand-spsod.html)? That will make sure the jQuery script is only downloaded and registered on the page if it hasn't been already. Thoughts?
January 27th, 2011 at 12:18 am
sorry, the text editor messed up the hyperlink to the URL above. Here it is again:
http://cglessner.blogspot.com/2010/08/sharepoint-scripts-on-demand-spsod.html
January 27th, 2011 at 5:58 am
@Thiago: That could be a problem indeed. Probably the easiest fix is to remove the jQuery version whatsoever so that you can use your own version of it. Using ScriptLink is definitely a nice solution as well. Thank you for the feedback.
January 27th, 2011 at 9:18 am
@Waldek: We too are referring to JQuery version 1.4.3 on our master page. How do we remove your version of JQuery? And what version are you using?
January 27th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
@Soren: he's using jQuery 1.4.2. You can run his DLL through Refactor, and see that at the bottom of his MetaFieldsEditor.OnInit() event.
@Waldek: I am not sure what your recommended solution was. I know that I have to remove one of the two referenced jquery scripts, but were you suggesting that you would update the code base for you control, to allow the user to configure it appropriately, or did you have something in mind for me to do in order to remove that referenced script?
January 27th, 2011 at 5:34 pm
Can you run this solution on SharePoint 2007?
January 28th, 2011 at 7:18 am
@Thiago: If you're looking for a quick fix you could overwrite the jquery file that I'm provisioning with your own version. In the future I will provide a fix where the jquery file won't have version in its name so that you can use any version. Ideally you would want to have it all configurable, but it's just a matter of time and planning.
January 30th, 2011 at 9:55 am
@Jag: I'm not sure it will work on SharePoint 2007, since it's been created for SharePoint 2010 and I haven't tested it with SharePoint 2007. I guess there is only one way to find out and to give it a try on a SharePoint 2007 environment.
January 30th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
@Waldek, @Thiago: How do I get the DLL? Under 'Download' I get the wsp file only.
January 30th, 2011 at 6:20 pm
@Soren: it's inside the WSP. You can either open it directly with an archive app such as 7-zip or you can change the extension to .cab and then open it in Windows.
January 30th, 2011 at 6:21 pm
@soren the wsp file is an archive, so you can rename it with a zip extension, then unzip it and you will find all dependencies for that solution, including the dll for the custom control.
February 23rd, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Having the issue with the "show page metadata" not displaying on a custom master page. I have read through the comments on the site and there is mention of adding the .body-wrapper class to the custom master page. So I am assuming this should be added to the head section, but what is not obvious to me is what should that class contain for style properties? Should it just be an empty class?
February 23rd, 2011 at 4:45 pm
@jriesen: You are right: the body-wrapper class is required to display the edit panel. You can see how it's being used and where it's being placed in the nightandday.master Master Page provided with SharePoint Server 2010.
February 23rd, 2011 at 5:26 pm
I reviewed that master page before sending my first message and there is no .body-wrapper class reference on that page, at least not in the source code. Maybe it renders after JIT. Is that the case? I am thinking that the instructions for implementing this solution should be very explicit rather than having to hunt for solution to get it working. Luckily, I am not new to SharePoint, but newbies would be absolutely lost.
February 23rd, 2011 at 9:08 pm
I retract my previous observation that the body-wrapper class is not reference in the nightandday master page. I found it. :-)
March 10th, 2011 at 8:57 pm
I could not get the feature to run.
I followed the steps bellow:
- Installed the WSP package – verified its deployed
I can not activate the feature on the site collection; it isn't visible to activate.
Do you know what can be wrong?
Thanks.
March 11th, 2011 at 8:35 pm
@Waldek – it might be beneficial for you to share the feature files you used to provision the site columns. I think ultimately, this should be a part of the solution as long as you make the internal field names pretty unique.
I took a stab at creating the with Powershell, but a feature provisioning is much better for re-deployment purposes.
March 11th, 2011 at 8:49 pm
Finally got the solution working. Required that the site columns must be named "description" and "keywords" and I used PowerShell to provision the columns because they cannot be added through the site settings UI (you will get an error – these column names are reserved). Since we are using custom master page it was also key to add the .body-wrapper class reference on that page.
March 11th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Ok…here's my stab at the Powershell script to provision the required fields for this solution to work…
#Get site and web object
$site = Get-SPSite -Identity "http://www.truthaboutsurfacemining.com"
$web = $site.RootWeb
#Assign fieldXML variable with XML string for site column
$fieldXML = '<Field Type="Note"
Name="MaventionMetaDescription"
Description="Used by Mavention Metafields solution to insert HTML Meta description in publishing pages."
DisplayName="description"
StaticName="MaventionMetaDescription"
Group="Publishing Meta Tags"
Hidden="FALSE"
Required="FALSE"
Sealed="FALSE"
UnlimitedLengthInDocumentLibrary="TRUE"
ShowInDisplayForm="TRUE"
ShowInEditForm="TRUE"
ShowInListSettings="TRUE"
ShowInNewForm="TRUE"> </field>'
#Output XML to console
write-host $fieldXML
#Create site column from XML string
$web.Fields.AddFieldAsXml($fieldXML)
#Assign fieldXML variable with XML string for site column
$fieldXML = '<Field Type="Note"
Name="MaventionMetaKeywords"
Description="Used by Mavention Metafields solution to insert HTML Meta keywords in publishing pages."
DisplayName="keywords"
StaticName="MaventionMetaKeywords"
Group="Publishing Meta Tags"
Hidden="FALSE"
Required="FALSE"
Sealed="FALSE"
UnlimitedLengthInDocumentLibrary="TRUE"
ShowInDisplayForm="TRUE"
ShowInEditForm="TRUE"
ShowInListSettings="TRUE"
ShowInNewForm="TRUE" > </field>'
#Output XML to console
write-host $fieldXML
#Create site column from XML string
$web.Fields.AddFieldAsXml($fieldXML)
#Dispose of Web and Site objects
$web.Dispose()
$site.Dispose()
March 12th, 2011 at 10:44 am
@Thiago: Thanks for sharing your PowerShell script. In my example I haven't used a Feature but created the columns using UI and then changed the display name using PowerShell, like:
$w = Get-SPWeb http://win2008
$f = $w.Fields["mvdescription"]
$f.Title = "description"
$f.Update()
I've also tried using a Feature with two Field SPI's, one for each field, and it worked perfectly. All you need to do is to provide a unique InternalName while creating the Column and after importing it to your package (CKS:DEV makes this really easy), just change the DisplayName and voilla.
May 29th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
@Waldek I have install the solution. I can the solution at the "Solution Management" site in "Zentral Administration". I also see the solution is deployed to the website that I choose.
I also have deployed the solution to the websitte without error with PowerShell.
But I can not see the solution in the "Website Feature" list??
What have I do wrong??
May 29th, 2011 at 7:15 pm
@ralf: you should look for the Feature in Site Collection Feature not Site Features.
May 29th, 2011 at 7:48 pm
@Waldek: Ok, I'm on the website "MyWebsite" on which the solution is deployed from the "Zentral Administration"
On the website "MyWebsite" I go over "site action/site settimgs/" to the site settings site. Under "Site Setings" I use the link "Manage Site Feature" and a list of installed solutions will be displayed.
But not your solution ??
Is that the right place? If is, do you have any idea how i can solve this problem?
May 31st, 2011 at 4:54 am
@ralf: No, you should go to Site Collection Features. The link is located on the Site Settings page as well.
May 31st, 2011 at 8:15 pm
@Waldek: Please, wehere can I find the site collection feature? In Zentral Administration?
May 31st, 2011 at 8:22 pm
@ralf: On your site (not in Central Administration!) go to Site Actions > Site Settings and in the Site Collection Administration section click on the Site Collection Features link.
May 31st, 2011 at 8:55 pm
@Waldeck: Many thanks! I have find it now.
May 31st, 2011 at 9:02 pm
@Waldek: Now it's running. I only miss the Meta Tag editor? I use the nightandday.master.
May 31st, 2011 at 9:44 pm
@ralf: Have you added the Field to the Content Type as explained in the article?
June 1st, 2011 at 6:08 am
@Waldek: Yes. In the source view I see now the meta tags "description" and "keywords".
June 1st, 2011 at 6:09 am
@Waldek: Yes. In the source view I see now the meta tags \"description\" and \"keywords\".
June 19th, 2012 at 7:49 am
hi Waldek, I m just wondering whether this can use in custom content type and layout page?
Plz advise.. Thanks. :)
June 20th, 2012 at 5:42 am
Yes you can.
July 9th, 2012 at 8:46 am
Hi Everyone
Beginner question: Are licenses required for this product? I cannot find any info relating to licenses.
Thanks
July 9th, 2012 at 2:55 pm
The version available on this blog is free of charge but it has some limitations as to what kind of Field Types are supported. Mavention offers an extended version of this solution which is a paid solution. Let me know if you would like to receive the licence information.
November 12th, 2012 at 9:34 am
Hi Waldek,
In the title of your post it states "for Publishing Pages", but is there any way for this to work on say, Article Page content type pages created using a non-publishing web template? We have an externally facing site using the old SPS web template, so I'm guessing that the tool won't work b/c it can't use publishing pages. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance, Won
November 19th, 2012 at 7:21 am
It should work no matter the Web Template used to create the Site (Collection) as long as you have the publishing capabilities activated in that site.
December 10th, 2012 at 8:39 am
Thanks Waldek! I got it to work, but ran into one add'l issue: the site collection also has In Place Records Management enabled, and this places a line above the meta tag line, causing the body to be recognized earlier so the meta tag lines end up in the body. I figure most publishing sites don't use records mgmt, but was wondering if you have any ideas on how to resolve this. Thanks again, Won
December 10th, 2012 at 1:17 pm
What is the line that is being added exactly (mind the HTML escaping when posting comments)?
December 12th, 2012 at 5:31 pm
It's , followed by an add'l set of empty span tags. I used the SP developer dashboard w/ asp.net trace to trace the id back to the In Place Records Management feature. I think part of the problem may also be due to the fact that the body-wrapper class was removed from the master page at some point in the past, but most of the contents of the class still exist, so the Mavention meta tag feature still works (it's just inserting the tag lines in the body instead). Thanks, Won
December 12th, 2012 at 5:35 pm
I noticed the tags got filtered out in my response just now, so here it is w/o the tag brackets:
span id="ctl00_ctl18_iprRibbon"
December 14th, 2012 at 7:51 am
Please disregard my previous request Waldek, my mistake. It was misplacement of a line in the master page, I finally found the cause. Sorry for the confusion,
Won