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Ever wanted (or perhaps your boss wanted) to be able to control any page title, description or keywords anywhere on your website? Even if the page was not a physical Symphony page?

Well, this extension lets you do just that. Simply install the extension, create your rules (following the on page instructions), add the "SEO Manager: Get Rule" event to your pages, then do what you want in your templates to output the values.

You can use either PCRE regular expressions to match your page URLs, or just use the simple wild-card expressions: /this/is/my/*/page/

Version 1.003

This is the first official version, it now includes a simple 'Usage Guide' that's probably completely inadequate, but who knows.

Do you have any documentation on this extension. How do we go about creating rules etc?

Nick, the extension includes documentation, if only a little.

Where? All I saw was how to install and enable.

I believe the way it works is this: Once you've created a rule for your page, and you've attached the SEO Manager event, you'll have access to the rule's data in that page's XML source. Then you can use it however you like in your XSL templates. Rowan, correct me if I'm wrong.

Rowan, I tried to download from Git but both the Zip and Tar downloads take me to a Git 404 page. Is this something Git generates itself?

Yeah, Github seems to have issues with the download feature. No idea what's up.

@czheng,

So if I created a rule for say my portfolio page. I add Portfolio in the title, a portfolio type description in the description, and a bunch of keywords in the keyword section - I then have that xml to play with.

But what can I do with the Expression part? I just whacked in the wildcard to just get it working. But how would I utilise that field?

It is designed to match your URL structure, so that with one rule in the extension you can target many pages, as opposed to duplicating the same rule for every page. This is especially useful if you have a heavily templated set of sub-pages, but a requirement arises for one specific sub-page to have customised meta information. You could target this one page with a rule, I imagine.

For your use, you will want to use the Expression part to match specific pages such as /portfolio/*, as Rowan says in the initial post.

oh ok, I see now.

so in the head section I can match any page that has the expression of test.

This is what /test/* gives in the xml:

        <expression>/^/test/.*$/i</expression>

Perhaps some research into expressions is required here, because it looks a little daunting. You see I am trying to look at this from a designers point of view, not a developers.

That's actually correct, you see, with a little bit of magic I turn the simple wild-card expression into a regular expression. The only reason I put the expression into the XML is to make debugging simpler.

In the future I plan to make this extension do a lot more, including allow custom headers to be sent - this side of things still needs a little planning, but it should be possible to send headers to change the content type, or perhaps redirect to another page.

Ok, well from my side of the fence more work is needed to allow people like me to understand what it is that is needed to be done.

I know that there are developers who create something that they understand and other php developers would understand, but Symphony have created a product that surely is aimed at both developers and designers, so I honestly believe that better documentation should be forthcoming, or at least a tutorial on how to get the basics done, because, and don't take this the wrong way, people may move to something like Expression Engine.

I'm aware the documentation is lacking, but I figured most people here, right now would be able to understand how to use it, so it was better to release it early for feedback, and to let people take advantage, then it was to wait until I have a chance to document it.

Just to be clear, you're able to use it now?

I wasn't having a go - just letting you know that not everyone is on the same page as everyone else. I just felt it implied too much.

The older version ( was that yours?) was good and it was much easier to use,

No, it's just late here, so not to worry.

As for the older version, well, I've never seen it, how did it handle this?

PS. Just about to release 1.003.

Well it just seemed easier. I don't have it to hand - but you had dropdown options to choose comparisons with page titles, etc, and if it matched a page title then you were able to populate the meta tags with the keywords etc...

I see, the problem with doing it that was is that you become limited to the actual physical pages of Symphony, I needed a system that matched against the current URL, so that I could give pages, displaying a specific entry, custom titles and keywords.

While the old was probably easier, the new is probably more powerful.

Power and flexibility is king.

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