OG meta info ignored by Events Calendar

[Renee Barnes]

I am using All in One SEO to add social meta tags to https://nyharborparks.org/ (and numerous other sites) and it works as it should for pages and regular blog posts, but not for events generated with the Events Calendar.

Though I enter the meta info into the All in One social form as usual on events, no OG tags are created. As a result, no image, the wrong image or a slideshow of images (some of which have nothing to do with the event) are displayed when shared on social media. In addition, the title and description shared are the “best guess” of the social platform, not the title and description specified in the All-in-One plugin.

Another bug: The event page editor does not display the main All in One form for search, only the one for social, and the one for social is missing the link to the Facebook debugger. Again, this is not true for regular pages and posts, only Events Calendar event posts.

This is not a minor problem. There are only two major SEO plugins, and All in One SEO is one of them. It has 1,000,000+ installations. As I’m sure you recognize, the ability to share events on social media is crucial to getting an audience.

Would you look into this problem and work with the All in One creator (Semper Plugins), if necessary, to find a solution?

This topic has been raised on your boards before, but you closed it without addressing it:
https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/og-image-description-entries-ignored/#post-1373236

For your reference, here is what the Facebook debugger shows for a regular news post from our site:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https://nyharborparks.org/a-conversation-on-freedom/

And here is what it shows for an event created with the Events Calendar — where, as you can see, there is a message saying no OG tags are present.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/sharing/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnyharborparks.org%2Fevent%2Fdiscover-fort-tompkins%2F

If you want to try sharing yourself to see the results, use these same posts for testing, as we have not bothered to add meta information to others:

• Regular blog post where All in One works properly: https://nyharborparks.org/a-conversation-on-freedom/
• Event post where it does not: https://nyharborparks.org/event/discover-fort-tompkins/

Many thanks for your attention to this matter.

Sheryl

[Barry]

Hi Sheryl,

I’m sorry to hear that.

Let’s kick off by poking at the missing social meta tags for single events. In my case, it seems like this is working as expected … here’s what I tried in order to replicate the problem:

• I visited the All in One SEO ‣ Feature Manager screen and enabled the social meta module
• Next I visited the All in One SEO ‣ Social Meta screen and checked the option to integrate with events
• I then edited an event and added a title, description and custom image via the All in One SEO Pack ‣ Social Settings tab
• After saving my changes I inspected the page and I saw that the relevant Open Graph tags were present, including one for the custom image

So this all appeared to work as expected. What’s interesting is that in your case, taking this event that you shared as an example, the tags aren’t present at all.

This suggests the steps I followed to replicate the problem need to be tweaked (if anything obvious jumps out at you, let me know) or else perhaps there is a conflict on your own site – with either your theme or another plugin (or perhaps there is a difference in version numbers).

“Out of the box”, though, it seems like social (Open Graph) tags for single events are working as expected. What are your thoughts on this one?

[Renee Barnes]

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your response. My steps were the same as yours with different results, as you noted.

We are using very few plugins on this site. In addition to All in One SEO, we are using:

Duplicate Post by Enrico Battocchi
Redirection by John Godley
404page by Peter Raschendorfer
Jetpack

Our theme is Enfold, which was supposed to be compatible with The Events Calendar. We do not have a staging site for nyharborparks.org, so cannot risk changing themes, to test. (It might be impossible to restore the design intact when we switched back.)

I went back to the post about the same problem on your forum — https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/og-image-description-entries-ignored/#post-1373236. I discovered that that site uses a different theme — parallax.

The post says social meta tags produced with All in One worked for Tribe events until 12-18 months ago, then stopped working.

The response to the post says that switching to Yoast solved the problem. If true, that suggests that there is indeed an incompatibility between All in One and The Events Calendar. Is this something you could look into, given how large the All in One user base is?

Thanks,

Sheryl

[Barry]

Sheryl,

We’d be happy to.

Since I don’t see the same problem as you are facing though I’ll need more information. Would you be down to share a database dump? Plugins like Duplicator are great for this if you’re not sure how, as in fact they go a step further and share your plugins with us, too.

If you’re able to do that and – depending on the size of the file – share it directly here or via a Dropbox or Google Drive link (or similar), that would be great. You can of course do so via private reply.

Thanks!

[Renee Barnes]

Thanks! Let me check with my client and get back to you.

[Barry]

For sure, we’ll be here 🙂

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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