Change Title of Root Event Page

[Micha McLain]

I’m can’t seem to figure out how to change the title tag of the root /event/ page. I have Yoast installed and can easily change the events and the categories, but that page simply doesn’t appear to have a setting anywhere.

Please advise. Thanks.

Micha

[Geoff]

Hi there, Micah! Thanks for getting in touch and welcome back to the forums. 🙂

You might be able to change the title tag using a snippet. Here is one that includes a ton of examples of how to change the title tag on various calendar views.

I do want to point out, however, that I have seen conflicts where the snippet above does not work while Yoast is activated and it’s always been caching-related. It’s worth trying, but if it doesn’t work for some reason, you may want to try clearing your site’s cache through Yoast as well as your host.

Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

Cheers!
Geoff

[Micha McLain]

I’m sorry, but why your system is convoluted in this regard is beyond me. Why can’t you do one of the two:

1) Make editable fields for users that buy your system to simply enter title and meta

2) Make your system work with a SEO Plug like Yoast or another

The reason most people buy plugins like this is to avoid having to define custom functions in PHP in the first place. Not only this, but titles are a very basic function… very.

Please explain why your company chooses to make this much more difficult than it needs to be.

Micha

[Riza]

Ditto! I can’t understand why don’t you offer a shortcode that we can place on any page we want and format the page as we want using the standard tools that are available to us since v1 of WordPress.

Heck we are not even allowed to use a sidebar without having to go to re-wring a page code in your templates. But, not able to manage title and description in 2015 is taking the mickey – one step too far.

This is simply not acceptable. You charge a good premium and you must react to such requests.

A recent Pro user.

[Riza]

At the bottom of this topic I see the following message. Why is the topic closed?

This topic is marked as closed to new replies, however your posting capabilities still allow you to do so.

[Micha McLain]

I agree with Riza… As a paying customer for a product that does charge a decent premium, I would expect certain basics like this to be easily covered and not required many lines of custom code.

One idea, would be in your core, to build in a select box for users to select which one of a couple popular SEO plugins. Once selected, the proper code to enable the use of that plugin would be enabled.

Not only can I not set the title and meta for /events/ root page, but further more, the design of you plugin causes massive amounts of 404 errors in Google Webmasters, which I’ve brought up in deferent threads, but the issue has never fully been rectified.

At the end of the day, you have zero build in SEO functions, and don’t allow any outside SEO tools to help users without lots of code. This should not be the case.

I want a simply solution… which is why we all purchased a prebuilt one. Otherwise, we’d either code our own or hire a develop to.

Please advise.

[Riza]

I’m glad that others agree (and that contrary to otherwise stated at the bottom of the posts topic is not closed to new replies).

I think the logical route is to have the Events Calendar specific pages to be defines with a post code. This will also remove th eneed to have templates with before/after HTML fields. Event Manager does this hence it must be doable.

Otherwise, Events Calendar MUST offer SEO options and play nice with main (two) SEO plugins. A website page that does not have a title that follows the rest of the site is pretty useless.

How one can publish a plugin that creates a main events page that renders the title as ” | Wilton Town” is beyond comprehension.

http://wiltontwon.com/events

And, no. The solution is not PHP jokeying in the theme functions.

[Rob]

Hi folks! Rob here; I head up the support team at Modern Tribe. Thanks a ton for your feedback. Geoff is out of town this week, and honestly given some of the comments in here and the fact that there’s disappointment/confusion coming through in some of the more recent posts…I felt like it’d make the most amount of sense to step in and try to set things straight.

Right off the bat, I would like to apologize for the poor experience you’ve both faced so far. It’s clear that we let you down here, and I think part of that was due to the fact that we falsely set expectations from the offset regarding plugin integration and what the plugin can and cannot do.

The comment about Yoast is a great one, and we have heard this feedback in the past – looking at our internal ticketing system I see we do have a ticket to explore better integration with Yoast, and it has quite a few votes on our UserVoice page as well (http://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/4912419-improve-seo-search-engine-optimization). It’s honestly very tricky to ensure that a code base as complicated as The Events Calendar is be compatible with any number of the 35,000+ public WordPress plugins. We work very hard to ensure that our code is compatible with the most recent versions of the most popular themes, plugins and of course WordPress core. To that end we’d be remiss to not pursue this and deliver what our customers want to see. Better SEO – either through integrating with Yoast or improving our own to better handle things on its own – is on the roadmap. I suspect will be tackled over the next couple of releases once we get the remaining bug tickets – related to problems in the core plugin itself, which we tend to view as a higher priority than how well it integrates with third-party plugins – taken care of.

Out of curiosity: was there documentation or sales copy somewhere that suggested the plugin would integrate with Yoast? We try to be very cautious about the expectations we set – so if we’ve got something out there misleading folks, I’d like to get that cleaned up ASAP so we can spare others your disappointment down the road. Please do point me towards it if so.

There are two other great points raised in here which I want to touch on as well:

* I see a couple comments related to implementing a shortcode. I’m not sure if you saw in our last release, but we introduced our first shortcode in that release, have a few more coming in the release we’re working on now, and will be adding even more in the 4.0 build that is coming next. Preserving all calendar functionality in a shortcode is no small feat – hence why it’s taken us so long – and while we want to get it out for you guys, we also want to make sure it’s built stable and adequately tested. We’re confident the community will be excited at the finished product.
* Riza, thanks for bringing the “closed” thread functionality to our attention – we recently moved from tri.be to theeventscalendar.com and it looks like that’s a bug that slipped through. I’ve got it logged now and it should be addressed very soon…we appreciate the heads up!

All that to say: we’re sorry we failed you. We try to be quite transparent about what the plugin does and does not do, so if you have ideas on how we could be clearer, I welcome those. Similarly: if you aren’t happy with the plugin and are still within 30 days of purchase, we’d be willing to issue either of you a refund, no questions asked. While it’d be a bummer to lose you as customers, I want to do right by you…even if that means directing you to a competing solution with a codebase and a support infrastructure more to your liking.

For now, PHP jokeying is probably going to be the best we’re able to offer when it comes to SEO concerns. As we make steps towards better integration with SEO plugins and third-party plugins in general, we’ll keep the community aware of the progress. And if that isn’t ambitious enough for you both or if you just want to move on, please do let us know. Thanks again for the feedback.

[Riza]

Fisrt of all thank you for the frank post, Rob. It is appreciated.

It’s honestly very tricky to ensure that a code base as complicated as The Events Calendar is be compatible with any number of the 35,000+ public WordPress plugins.

Nobody is asking you to make EC compatible with all 35K plugins. We are asking you to make it compatible with two major SEO plugins, AIOSEO and Yoast, which are EACH downloaded 20 MILLION times. Name me another plugin used that much. When certain plugins are in such widespread use (there are very few with such pedigree) it is the developers job to treat it like they are an integral part of WordPress.

Having said that, not thinking of SEO when creating a plugin that generates pages/posts is a major blunder. It is so major that I would think it is wiser to stop eradicating bugs but concentrate on correcting the SEO issues.

Without SEO you might as well not have a website!

On my blog by default you had generated a calendar page titled ” | Wilton Town”. I.e. you had generated NO no page title, just the website name. To me is a category 1 bug because it misses a major function of generating a page.

You may disagree but you may also be long and have clients deserting you. EM is catching up fast…

[Micha McLain]

I agree 100% with Riza. Nothing else matters if the site has such poor SEO implementation that it can not rank. the formula is easy… no traffic = no conversions = really bad ROI for your product.

I am feed up with your companies consistent passive nature with this issue. It’s NOT optional.

Now, what can be optional, is what SEO plugin to allow to work with your system. That, I get. Yoast is in the top few for sure, so I would recommend that. But, you could either implement your own SEO settings (as I previously suggested) or you could make your system work with a third party SEO plugin. Either way, SEO IS A MUST, not an after thoughts.

I also never saw sales copy that specifically said your system worked with any other SEO plugin, but there wasn’t anything that said it wouldn’t either. And, given that we’ve never encountered any custom post type system that works as poorly with Yoast, an assumption was made that it would work.

I like the functionality of your system and too would hate to leave. However, between your systems automatic creation of thousands of 404 errors based on future date searches that aren’t relevant and no built in way to stop your system from doing that, to the abysmal SEO capabilities, I’m severely disappointed.

My purchase was much longer than 30 days ago as well. I’ve been hanging in there with you guys based on the notion that you would eventually start fixing these issues. However, I like Riza, feel that you need to stop fixing stupid bugs, and fix these issues that are core to ANY WEBSITE, not just a calendar based system.

For basic, and I do mean very basic SEO, we should have full control over the following:

– Titles
– Meta Descriptions
– Index/No-Index
– Follow/No-Follow

I realize that most of your /event/ and other slugs that are not directly tied to a page are the main issues here. This is simply because you haven’t given us control over these parameters in your system and because they’re slugs and not pages, Yoast simply doesn’t work for it.

At the end of the day, we just need this fixed. Please advise.

Micha

[Rob]

Hey folks!

Thanks to both of you for the detailed and civil responses…I appreciate it, and you both raise some great points here. Rather than try to reply to you both independently – I’m going to try and speak more generally to the points raised here.

At its core, it sounds like we’re discussing really two issues here that are probably worth divorcing from one another:

1) How The Events Calendar handles SEO on its own, independent of how it interacts with other plugins; and
2) How The Events Calendar integrates with third-party SEO plugins like Yoast.

I get the sense – and correct me if I’m wrong here – that #1 is not an issue here. The plugin has its own way of handling SEO and we tweak/modify that from time-to-time to make sure its performing as intended. But what we’re concerned with is #2 here: how the plugin behaves alongside Yoast, which takes over from an SEO perspective and in this case conflicts. So users in your positions are ultimately left having to decide: do I want to run The Events Calendar without an SEO plugin, and have SEO covered on the calendar but none of the rest of my pages? Or do I want to run Yoast, which adds SEO value to the rest of the site content but causes a problem with events?

Please do correct me if I’m wrong here – for example, the |Wilton Town problem reported by Riza doesn’t seem like it’d be a problem if Yoast wasn’t running. (Our plugin on its own handles title tags better for the events page).

To me this sounds like a matter of having to choose which is more important: SEO on everything but the calendar, or SEO on just the calendar itself? I certainly can see why the former would be a safer call that 99% of users would opt for, but I do want to stress that this isn’t “the plugin doesn’t do SEO.” It’s instead, “the plugin doesn’t work with this SEO plugin.” Which is admittedly a more narrow scope than the alternative.

That said, I do appreciate the concern and the need to integrate with Yoast. And as I mentioned previously this is a priority for us. But we do have to weigh it against other concerns, and admittedly bugs in our own codebase – things that are impacting everyone who runs it, rather than the subset of those running it alongside X or Y plugin – take priority. In the interest of being fully transparent there is even one other plugin, WPML, that is higher on our priorities list to address before we hit Yoast. But Yoast is a close second (where All-In-One falls is TBD, since we haven’t seen as much demand there) and is something we are committed to doing.

It’s also worth noting: we actually have been in contact with the Yoast team about better integration. Back in August of last year, we were contacted by Joost and sent along the top concerns we see related to how the plugins integrate, as well as a fix we’d identified for one of them. (The issue highlighted here was among the items we mentioned as well). While I never heard back from him on that, this thread prompted me to follow-up again today to see if his dev team was able to make any progress.

The idea of giving specific SEO fields within the plugin is a solid one, and is worth exploring more as a team. But I also think it risks diverging from what this plugin is intended to be. Before we go so far as adding SEO fields to our plugin – which is meant to be purely a calendar solution, rather than a calendar with robust SEO capabilities – the right solution is integrating with the popular plugins. That would solve your problems and likely many other users who are concerned with SEO.

So where does that leave us? In the short-term, realistically, I think the snippet provided initially is the best we can offer up. I’d love to get this 100% squared away for you both on the spot, but due to the level of code work required to do this right, it’s unfortunately not a change we can make on-the-spot. I can appreciate that competing plugins such as Event Manager may be making progress on this at a faster pace than we are…which is awesome. I’m optimistic that if our plugin isn’t serving your needs, Event Manager or one of the other calendar plugins out there will.

Thanks again for the feedback and for pushing for this. If I happen to hear back from Yoast’s team that they’ve made progress on their end, I’ll definitely let you both know.

[Micha McLain]

I too think the right solution is to integrate with SEO plugins. You’re right that if you made some better SEO internally, then users would still have a situation where they’d have good SEO on the calendar, but not anywhere else.

That reason alone is enough to make the choice to provide better support for an SEO plugin.

I really do appreciate you taking this seriously and making it a priority. As I said before, I love the system overall and want to continue to use it.

On the subject of SEO though ( and I have brought this up before as well as other users ), you should really find a way to limit the amount of future dates a calendar makes to limit excessive 404s.

For instance, in my calendar, we only have things schedule a max of 6 months in advance, yet because of the way the plugin works there are literally thousands of future date slugs created. And, because those dates don’t have any calendar info, they return 404s.

I realize there’s debate on whether or not 404s cause issues with SEO, but I believe that that many will. think about it… Google sees a hundred or so “good” pages, and 10k 404 errors. There’s no way that’s helping my site.

So, while this is a different issue than the plugin, it should also be addressed because of the potential negative SEO effects.

As too changing to a different plugin, I much appreciate the openness here, but I’d rather avoid a huge platform shift if I can.

Please keep us posted.

[Riza]

The plugin has its own way of handling SEO and we tweak/modify that from time-to-time to make sure its performing as intended.

Are you talking about the PHP snippets method as ‘your way’ of handling SEO?

the |Wilton Town problem reported by Riza doesn’t seem like it’d be a problem if Yoast wasn’t running.

I’m not sure if I read this correctly. I’m not runnung Yoast or any other SEO plugin, yet and the above is how I’m seeing my main calendar page. How can that NOT be a problem? The title lacks the page name!!!

[Rob]

Thanks a ton for the follow-ups, folks. Since I’ve written you a pair of novels already – I suspect you don’t want to read another 🙂 But I did want to acknowledge that I saw these both, and wanted to reply on a couple of items that warranted it.

Right off the bat: I will note that I got a reply from Joost and his team this morning after my email yesterday, and they’re interested in working with us to drive things forward. I’m optimistic that this will improve our timeline and will definitely keep you posted. It does sound like – independent of Yoast – we should prioritize the 404 issue, and I’m simultaneously going to do some digging into whether any of the code cleanup work we’ve got in our forthcoming 3.10 build (which is pretty massive) will address this. Either way, I will keep you posted in this as well. Teammultiverse, I may reach out to you directly – outside of the forums – for some additional context on your situation if we can’t glean enough from your forum threads. But the 404 issue is concerning and should be addressed sooner rather than later, to whatever extent possible.

I appreciate the clarification from you, Riza. I apologize for the confusion – as this was originally a thread related to Yoast, and you posted after Teammultiverse’s original entry outlining the problem with Yoast, I assumed you were in the same boat. Generally when multiple voices pop up in the same thread it’s due to the fact that they’re facing the same issue (we generally ask users to open up their own threads in situations where the core problem differs). It was wrong of me to make that assumption. The problem you are reporting is definitely not a core function of the plugin – when I test locally on my stripped down install (no other plugins, a stock theme), my title tags for the home page are:

Upcoming Events | My Site Name

Have you tested for a conflict, in case one could be the cause here? Based on my own testing it seems possible this could be the case. If that isn’t the solution it may be worth opening another thread so we can work through it undistracted and in as timely a fashion as possible.

Thanks again to you both for the feedback. We’ll keep you posted, and you should always feel comfortable checking in for an update if you don’t think things are moving quickly enough.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by Rob.

[Riza]

I like reading novels written by publishers 🙂

I was simply using this thread because unable to change the page title was exactly my issue. I do however now read your ‘Pro tip’ and follow it accordingly.

FYI, I have disabled the plugin on my site and the page title appeared as “In Wilton | Wilton Town’ which is what it should be. I have then enabled all plugin one by one and as Murphy dicates the page title stayed on correctly.

There must have been a glitch somewhere but who cares, it now works. If it fails again I will open a new topic.

[Author]

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