Posting link on Facebook shows shortcode

Hi @unexploded,

Thanks for your comment!

This probably means that a plugin (SEO plugin or social sharing plugin) or your theme is generating an excerpt for Facebook. While generating the excerpt, it is not parsing the WP Tiles shortcode, hence it shows up like that.

If you only use WP Tiles on a single page, you could check if manually writing an excerpt (in the excerpt metabox) would fix the Facebook problem.

Otherwise you’d need to find our what plugin is generating the FB snippet and find out a way to make is parse shortcodes!

Mike

Hi Mike, thanks for your reply!

Well I did take a look to see if there might be any plugins causing this issue and I couldn’t find anything. Also, I checked our template and it was definitely using the_content as opposed to the_excerpt.

That said, I took the shortcode out of the WordPress page, and instead put it straight into the template using php echo do_shortcode.

This has pretty much got around the problem of displaying the shortcode, so thank you for guiding me in the right direction.

However, is it possible for it to pick up the excerpt of the most recent post? Right now, Facebook just says ‘Social Club’ as the title (the title of the page) with ‘Jimmy Trims’, which is the company name, as the description of the page.

You can see WP Tiles on https://www.jimmytrims.com/social-club

Thanks!

In fact, I tried Facebook’s Object Debugger. It scrapes just the Javascript and not the post-load content.

I don’t suppose this is something that has been updated in Tiles 1.0 beta? I read something about SEO…

Hi @unexploded!

Happy to hear you got it working by hardcoding the shortcode in your template.

I didn’t realize you were on an older version of the plugin! This is definitely one of the improvements in 1.0. The old version didn’t render any content until the JS kicked in, making the posts invisible for bots. The new version will output the tiles as ordinary HTML first, and turn them into tiles when the JS kicks in. So with the new version FB and Google should see the content on the tiles too.

Also, since you’re on the path of putting WP Tiles in your template, check out the [template tags](https://wp-tiles.com/docs/template-tags/). They are a much more flexible way of implementing WP Tiles for the php savvy!

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike, thanks for the reply. I have just upgraded to 1.0. I have to say it was a bit of a pain – the plugin wouldn’t upgrade, the old folder wouldn’t delete. In the end I managed to overwrite it. On a positive note the management side of things seems way better!

I’ve taken a look through the documentation and I just can’t seem to see anything about updating the shortcodes to 1.x. The only one I could see was the post type example.

I’m quering using category. I’d also like to remove the display type buttons at the top. My old shortcode was as follows:

[wp-tiles posts_query="category=18" colors="#ccc, #333, #eee" show_selector="false"]

Also, is there anyway of paginating the results, or, even nicer, load more upon scroll?

Thanks very much for your help thus far.

Hi again!

Sorry to hear the upgrade was problematic. Do you have problems with upgrading more often, or do you think something in WP Tiles could have caused the problems?

The new version comes with a compatibility layer for the old shortcode syntax, but it’s better to upgrade your shortcode. The only thing you need to look up is the slug for category 18.

[wp-tiles category=my-category colors="#ccc, #333, #eee" grids='My Grid Title']

If you have selected a single grid, the selector will be hidden automatically.

Then, the new version does come with pagination! No infinite scroll pagination yet, because of potential theme problems, though. But try out setting pagination to ajax. It will load the next page without causing a page refresh.

Mike

Hi Mike, ah it wasn’t a complaint as such, just to make that clear- I’m grateful for the plugin! Just wanted to make you aware I guess. I wouldn’t want to say for sure that it was definitely WP Tiles that was the problem but I do work on dozens of WordPress sites; I’ve never experienced that issue.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction on the shortcode!

Does the pagination kick in automatically?

A quick update, I looked over the documentation again, got the pagination working, thank you.

The shortcode above caused some issues. At first I thought it was the apostrophes, as the shortcode wraps using apostrophes. In the end I stripped out the quote marks and apostrophes and got it working.

Thanks!