As developers living in a Western Country, a lot of us are used to build websites for left-to-right languages only and, depending on your clients and their markets, chances are high you might never have to worry about any other directional concept – until you suddenly do.Meta tags are often underrated. Sure, they are not visible on your page up front but they are those hidden ninjas that can elevate your SEO game. These modest snippets of text that describe your page can turn out to be invaluable. Information in the meta tags can appear in the search engine results, browser tab, and social media posts. The Drupal 9 Metatag module helps site builders dynamically create and manage these metadata (or meta) tags for each of their web pages through an interactive admin interface (and no code!).
With the Drupal Metatag module, you can provide structured metadata and even customize meta tag elements. Meta elements are tags used in HTML or XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a web page. They are part of a web page's head section. Multiple meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Let's dive in and learn how to improve your website’s SEO ranking by setting up the Metatag module the right way.
Meta tags can specify a web page's title, description, keywords, and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. You need to add meta tags in the head section of your Drupal 9 pages for the title, description, keywords, Twitter card, and Facebook open-graph - to make your website SEO friendly. Download and install the module here.
With the Drupal Metatag module, we can configure:
Let’s discuss more on configuring the Metatag module for each one of them.
After installing the module, you can edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags. Set the global configuration for the front page. Click on Edit to get into the details.
Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Frontpage
Enter the Page Title, Description, Abstract, and Keywords.
Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Frontpage
This snippet is useful not only to search engines but also to your users. It appears in the title bar of your web page and should not exceed 55 characters. It also acts as a title for when your web page is bookmarked.
Enter a brief description of your website. Make sure that the description does not exceed 150 characters because search engines won't display more than that on a results page. If you don't have either field filled out, Google will decide what to display without any input from you. It can be very helpful to write up a snappy description for your content here.
Enter a brief Abstract (Optional). Again, keep it to fewer than 150 characters but instead of something snappy, try to be as plainly descriptive as possible.
Enter a comma-separated list of keywords relevant to your website.
There are some important elements here that were previously handled by code.
Drupal 9 Metatag - Advanced Settings
Normally, if you want to block or allow search engines from indexing a page or disallow search engines to display cached copies or descriptions of your page, you would edit the site-wide Robots.txt file. Here, you can control all of it and more with the Robots meta tag by checking/unchecking the various indexing options it provides.
This Meta tag is exclusively used by Google News, which uses comma-separated keywords as inputs.
Any details about copyright or trademarks that you might have, should go here.
This one is also relatively new and can be handy for telling social networks which image they should use with a post.
Canonical URLs are very useful for dealing with duplicate content issues. This is something that is often a problem on e-commerce sites where product listings are duplicated on multiple pages. The Metatag module does a good job of handling this by default.
This element acts as an alternative to link shorteners. In Drupal they usually come out looking something like this:
This tag is also something that Google came up with, this time to help identify the original source of content. This one may be particularly useful for news sites, but can be safely ignored by most.
Once you have updated all the fields, save your settings.
To configure meta tags for a content type, you will need to edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags and set the global configuration for Content. Click on Edit to get into the details. If you want to add different metatags for different content types, click on the “Add default Meta tags” link on the top left corner of the page. Select the content type you wish to add metatag to and click on Save and configure.
Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Content types
Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Content type: Article
The content type will be listed in the Meta tags screen. The above screenshot shows the content type ‘Article’. Click on Edit to add metatags.
Enter Page Title, Description, Abstract, and other necessary settings. Follow the same procedure as mentioned above in configuring metatags for the front page.
Enable “Metatag: Views” module which is a sub-module of the metatag module.
Drupal 9 Metatag - Configuration for Views
Edit global configurations at /admin/config/search/metatags. Click on override to get into the details.
To add the meta tags in view go to the views edit screen and click on the meta tags link.
The above setting is the default setting for the view page.
The Drupal 9 Metatag module is a powerful amalgamation of various individual modules that aims at lowering manual coding to configure meta tags. Modules like the Page Title, Open graph Meta tags, Easy Meta, Refresh, and more are now merged into the Metatag module. It also provides multilingual support, can override meta tags based on entity objects, supports editorial workflows, and much more. As a leading Drupal development company, we implement best practices both in strategy and coding that can help you achieve project success. Starting a new Drupal project? Talk to our Drupal experts today to find out how we can help.
Author: Shefali Shetty
Meet Shefali Shetty, Director of Marketing at Specbee. An enthusiast for Drupal, she enjoys exploring and writing about the powerhouse. While not working or actively contributing back to the Drupal project, you can find her watching YouTube videos trying to learn to play the Ukulele :)
Drupal 9 Drupal 9 Module Drupal Development Drupal Drupal Planet SEOLeave us a Comment
Upgrading and consolidating multiple web properties to offer a coherent digital experience for Physicians Insurance
Upgrading the web presence of IEEE Information Theory Society, the most trusted voice for advanced technology
Great Southern Homes, one of the fastest growing home builders in the United States, sees greater results with Drupal 9
View all Case StudiesToday we are talking about Not Gaming the Credit System with Tim Lehnen.
For show notes and more information visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/367
TopicsNic Laflin - www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan John Picozzi - www.epam.com @johnpicozzi Tim Lehnen - @hestenet
MOTWFacets The Facet module allows site builders to easily create and manage faceted search interfaces. In addition to the UI components that come out of the box, themers and module developers can build their own widgets that can optionally be contributed back to Drupal.org. Facets work with Drupal Core Search and Search API, meaning that code and configuration can be reused as-is with the most popular search solutions available to Drupal.
Building websites for universities and colleges comes with a unique set of challenges. Unlike most organizations, higher education institutions are not singular entities but constellations composed of faculties, institutes, departments, administrative units, and ad hoc entities and initiatives. Many of these distinct components have their own set of audiences and functional requirements as well as a shared need for brand uniformity.
Furthermore, a post-secondary institution’s web presence is as important as its campus grounds in terms of how the world perceives it, and its websites need to be up-to-date and modern-looking to compete effectively in the global marketplace.
Higher education websites also pose unique challenges from a content management standpoint. University and college websites typically have significant legacy content that needs to be carried over from previous sites. They also may have dozens or even hundreds of people, from instructors to support staff, who need to create and post content every semester – people who may have had minimal CMS training.
Add in budgetary constraints and timelines dictated by the rhythms of the academic year, and you have a recipe for a challenging environment in which to run digital projects.
In our work with universities and colleges across North America, Evolving Web has focused on two content management systems: Drupal and WordPress. As the CMS of choice for 71% of the world’s top 100 universities, Drupal is best suited to the complexities that often exist in the post-secondary context. We address how well Drupal is suited to higher education websites in this blog post.
Institutional websites like those used in higher education typically need robust and customizable search interfaces that can integrate third-party systems such as those used for course catalogues. They also often require a multi-site architecture and integration with third-party marketing and identity management tools. For such sites, Drupal is the clear choice for a CMS. Among its advantages are:
However, for simpler sites with less robust current and future requirements, WordPress’ simplicity and ease of use are advantageous.
WordPress has block editing tools that enable users to easily create interesting content layouts. The CMS is intuitive for site authors and editors, and widely used, therefore requiring only minor training.
Both platforms are open source, meaning that best practices tend to be shared amongst higher education institutions, which provides a huge advantage over proprietary options.
Institutions change. They expand, become more complex and outgrow their original digital homes. So what might have started as a simple site befitting WordPress might come to benefit from Drupal’s features.
These are some signs that the CMS you are using might no longer be fit for the job you’re asking of it:
Higher education institutions ask a lot from their content management systems. Your typical university or college website is an amalgam of new and archival content aimed at a wide range of audiences – current and prospective students, faculty and staff, administrators, alumni, donors and others – and often maintained by a large team of content creators.
Higher education CMSs are liable to get messy quickly unless the right structures are established at the start.
At Evolving Web, we build websites with the expectation that they will continue to be relevant for years after they launch. The philosophy is that the client team will have the ability and tools to update the content and structure as needed throughout the website’s lifecycle. However, most websites don’t last that long, with research showing that the average site lasts around two years and seven months according to Orbit Media. Whether or not your site outlives this average depends on the robustness of the original design and whether it’s set up in a sustainable way.
Here are six strategies that higher education institutions can use to get the most out of their CMS and ensure the longest possible lifespan for their investment:
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Last week I visited the city of Prague to attend the European DrupalCon 2022. The even was held between September 20th and 23rd, and was attended by over 1,200 people.
This was my first physical conference since DrupalCamp London 2020, and the first DrupalCon I have attended since DrupalCon Dublin 2016. Despite the worries about covid I was still pretty exited to attend the event. I arrived on Monday night and as the event didn't start properly until Tuesday afternoon it gave me a small chance to explore the city of Prague before the conference started.
There were so many talks, sessions, meetings, and events during DrupalCon that I could write for pages and pages about the conference. I am quite sure, however, that no one would actually read all of that I'll just post a couple of highlights from each day and provide a sum up at the end.
After the initial welcoming talk the conference started with an introduction to some of the initiatives that are being worked on at the moment, each one introduced by a member of the initiative team. The initiatives discussed where CKEditor 5, project browser, project update bot, GitLab integration, localize.drupal.org, distributions and recipes, and automatic updates.
If you look over this blog, or know me, you will see that I’ve now have reasonably significant experience as both a Salesforce and Drupal developer. The last couple weeks I have been thing about what from my Drupal experience supports my work as a Salesforce developer.
I think there are three parallels that are encouraged in Drupal developers that helped me learn to be a good Salesforce developer quickly.
Both Drupal and Salesforce run in constrained environments. Web applications, regardless of their purpose, have to protect themselves against bad actors and bad neighbors. There are execution timeouts and memory limits, for both platforms. Salesforce adds a variety of additional limits and governors, but they are all logical extensions about memory and time. Lots of other platforms allow developers to ignore resource use until they reach a crisis point. Don’t believe me, just check the memory used by Chrome, Electron Apps, or any other Chromium-based application.
Working in resource constrained environments forces you to think through how to use the resources you do have efficiently. While these platforms aren’t like working on hardware with highly limited resources, they still can test your resourcefulness.
Drupal and Salesforce both provide ways to run large jobs across many processing contexts. New developers on both platforms often only resort to using batch and queueable operations as a last resort, but learning to use those solutions is critical to success on most interesting projects. When you try to avoid them you create solutions that appear to work and fail at scale.
Coming to Salesforce from Drupal, I already knew and understood the importance of asynchronous batch processing. So when solutions needed batch processing it was second nature to learn that part of the platform.
For all Salesforce’s push and marketing to avoid code, Salesforce developers are often taught that once you write code you just do everything in your code. The interfaces you can use to extend the platform’s existing solutions are treated as advanced topics. But when you work with Drupal, you are encouraged from the start to create modules that build on and extend the platform’s existing strength. Drupal developers are encouraged to leverage the features and utilities all around them.
This has always been true, but even more after Drupal’s move to leverage Symphony plugins and services. As a developer used to extending the platform, I came to Salesforce looking for ways to extend the platform’s declarative tools.
Often Salesforce developers create powerful solutions built purely in code triggered by record changes or simple buttons. They look passed Apex Actions that extend the Flow declarative automatons, platform events, and other tools that extend the system. But when you embrace a platform’s basic structures you often create more flexible solutions than your could with pure code.
The mind set of extending a platform, which I brought with me from my Drupal work helps me create tools and solutions that are designed to adapt over time.
Event driven architectures are not new, but their popularity continues to grow. Where platforms used to follow informal patterns that equated to event systems, now we see formal event structures being build to replace old habits.
Drupal and Salesforce both have had event frameworks for a long time: Drupal had hooks (events by naming convention), Salesforce had triggers.
Both have seen major upgrades to their event patterns in recent versions. Platform events in Salesforce, still making their full power clear to a lot of developers. Symphony brought proper events to Drupal in version 8 and continue to help push the platform forward.
I have learned to leverage the events systems on both platforms. Understanding them as tightly constrained state machines, and learning to push them to their limits, helps me get the most from both platforms.
My experience with Drupal hooks and events has made it obvious to me when to leverage Salesforce’s Platform events. As Salesforce increases the number of places you can use them in their declarative tools, it increases the value of this approach.
As a developer, what you learn in one part of your career can make you stronger in the next. As a field we’re not actually that creative. Even if the details are different, the concepts will often carry forward because they are built on the same fundamentals. Whatever platform you are using today, learn how to make it sing – it’ll help you learn the next faster and better.
The post What I Brought from Drupal to Salesforce appeared first on Spinning Code.