Auto-Generating Meta Titles with PODS Custom Fields

Hi Sybre,

I’m attempting to programmatically generate meta titles for all posts with the “product” custom post type on my website.

I’d like the meta title to be a concatenation of several custom fields from the PODS plug-in.

I’m following your answer to this post on using PODS fields to generate titles and descriptions.

I’ve created the following snippet to generate meta titles for products:

add_filter( 'the_seo_framework_title_from_custom_field', function( $title, $args ) {

	// A custom title is found for TSF already, let's skip further processing.
	if ( $title ) return $title;

	// If Pods is deactivated, skip further processing.
	if ( ! function_exists( 'pods_field' ) ) return '';

	if ( null === $args ) {
		// In the loop. This means we are going through posts. 
		$post_id = get_the_ID(); 
		
		// Check if post is a product 
		if (get_post_type($post_id) == 'products') {
			// Initialize the SEO title as the post (product) title 
			$title = get_the_title($post_id);
			// Grabs the subtitle meta field from the product 
// 			$subtitle = get_post_meta($post_id, key:"subtitle", single:true);
			$subtitle = get_post_meta($post_id, "subtitle", true);
			// Check whether product has a featured brand by seeing if 
			// "By: " is included in subtitle or features 
			$brand_pos = strpos($subtitle, "By: ");
			
			// This conditional will be entered if a brand was found 
			if ($brand_pos) {
				// brand_name_idx is the starting index of the brand name 
				$brand_name_idx = $brand_pos + 4; 
				
				// move brand_name_idx to the ending index of the brand name 
				while ($brand_name_idx < strlen($subtitle)) {
					if ($subtitle[$brand_name_idx] == '|') {
						// Get rid of space (' ') before pipe seperator
						$brand_name_idx -= 1;
						break;
					}
					$brand_name_idx += 1;
				}
				$brand_name_length = $brand_name_idx - $brand_pos;
				// substr() function has args: (string, start_pos, length)
				$brand_name = substr($subtitle, $brand_pos, $brand_name_length);
				
				// Append brand name to title
				$title = $title . ' ' . $brand_name;
			}
		} else {
			// Not a product 
			return '';
		}
	} 


	return $title;
}, 10, 2 );

The problem is I’ve activated the snippet and the titles are not being set.

I can’t figure out when the ‘the_seo_framework_custom_field_description’ hook is triggered. That’s made it difficult for me to test and debug the code. Can you share more detail on how the hook and filter works?