@zcwilt @ajeh @drbyte
Spoke with Chris last night.. Shared with him that I have been working with lat9 (Cindy) on a major change/improvement to the way meta tags are managed in Zen Cart.
After I wrote up the basic spec outline and hired Cindy on behalf of my client to create this module for me.. It was borne out of what I feel is a very big gap/deficiency that I have long wanted to address in Zen Cart, and I do intend to share it with the community because I think it's a necessary module. That said, I think this same kind or similar change needs to be implemented in the Zen Cart core. So I have tagged you all to get your feedback. I wanted to vet this with you guys before bringing this up on the Zen Cart repo..
The assumptions and subsequent functionality within this module were based on taking a HARD look at how other content management and e-commerce systems deal natively with meta tags (without the need for plugins or modules). I did some in depth analysis of other systems I've worked with in both my corporate dayjob and as a independent web developer. The systems compared include:
Sitecore
.NetNuke
Sharepoint
Joomla
WordPress (but of course.. :smile: )
OpenCart
PrestCart
Magento
What stood out for me is all of these programs include some kind of meta tag intelligence where, in the absence of an explicitly defined meta tag, they will examine the page content and generate meta tags which match the page content. Any page specific meta tags override the auto generated ones.. None include any kind of "generic" meta tags present in the current Zen Cart code.
I also took a look at WordPress plugins in this class including "All in One SEO Pack" and the popular "Yoast SEO" plugin as well as the "Add Meta Tags" plugin.
All of these plugins offer similar features as this module and include some kind of intelligence with regards to how automatic meta tags are generated. Finally all of these plugins with the exception of the "Add Meta Tags" plugin de-emphasize the keywords meta tag because modern browsers rarely look at this meta tag. They do not remove it explicitly which provides siteowners with the choice to create a keyword meta tag or not. Finally like these plugins if there is no specific tag defined and tags are not being automatically created, the HTML output will not include empty empty meta tags..
Zen4All
commented
8 years ago
@zcwilt @ajeh @drbyte Spoke with Chris last night.. Shared with him that I have been working with lat9 (Cindy) on a major change/improvement to the way meta tags are managed in Zen Cart.
After I wrote up the basic spec outline and hired Cindy on behalf of my client to create this module for me.. It was borne out of what I feel is a very big gap/deficiency that I have long wanted to address in Zen Cart, and I do intend to share it with the community because I think it's a necessary module. That said, I think this same kind or similar change needs to be implemented in the Zen Cart core. So I have tagged you all to get your feedback. I wanted to vet this with you guys before bringing this up on the Zen Cart repo..
The assumptions and subsequent functionality within this module were based on taking a HARD look at how other content management and e-commerce systems deal natively with meta tags (without the need for plugins or modules). I did some in depth analysis of other systems I've worked with in both my corporate dayjob and as a independent web developer. The systems compared include: Sitecore .NetNuke Sharepoint Joomla WordPress (but of course.. :smile: ) OpenCart PrestCart Magento
What stood out for me is all of these programs include some kind of meta tag intelligence where, in the absence of an explicitly defined meta tag, they will examine the page content and generate meta tags which match the page content. Any page specific meta tags override the auto generated ones.. None include any kind of "generic" meta tags present in the current Zen Cart code.
I also took a look at WordPress plugins in this class including "All in One SEO Pack" and the popular "Yoast SEO" plugin as well as the "Add Meta Tags" plugin.
All of these plugins offer similar features as this module and include some kind of intelligence with regards to how automatic meta tags are generated. Finally all of these plugins with the exception of the "Add Meta Tags" plugin de-emphasize the keywords meta tag because modern browsers rarely look at this meta tag. They do not remove it explicitly which provides siteowners with the choice to create a keyword meta tag or not. Finally like these plugins if there is no specific tag defined and tags are not being automatically created, the HTML output will not include empty empty meta tags..
Would love to hear your thoughts..