Apparently Google doesn't like it if all of your pages have the same title and meta description tags. So yesterday I decided to write unique titles and description tags for all of my pages. At first I did this by setting two variables - $title and $description - in my controllers and then passing them to the views, where I displayed them in my layout/app.blade.php. Since I have multiple languages in this site I ended up setting them like this:

$title = trans('whatever.pagetitle');
$description = trans('whatever.pagedescription');

This seemed a bit inelegant and I thought I could come up with a better way, which I did this morning. What I did was set up a file in my lang directory I called metadata.php. A sample of this is here. This file contains for each page a key for title and description as follows:

'/home-title' => 'Title';
'/home-description' => 'Description';

By using the URI appended with the value I want I was able to consolidate all of the values into one file for ease of use, and I was also able to make a helper function to get those values from the translation files and display it, so that the same exact code could be run on every single page and return the data I need. 

The helper function I used is on my GitHub here, and if it doesn't find data for the page it is looking for it has a default title and description it uses. For pages like blog articles and individual records I use the same title and description, but I still specify $title in the Controller, and if the value exists it is appended to the title in the layout file.

I like this solution because it allowed me to delete the redundant and ugly code in the controllers where I specified a title and description for each page with a function that pulls the data from one location, and if the data doesn't exist it substitutes a default in, instead of either failing or not doing anything. The code I used is on my GitHub Gist.

Etiketten: coding, laravel