Social cards markup for twitter doesn’t work

Hi Aitor,

I just tried the page on Twitter Card validator and it gave me this error:

INFO:  Page fetched successfully
INFO:  25 metatags were found
INFO:  twitter:card = summary_large_image tag found
ERROR: Invalid value (message: Field description failed to validate because: text expects tag property, but not found in Map().)

This essentially means no twitter description is output. I’ll check for a fix for 2.8.1. Should be released ASAP.

Cheers!

Edit:
I’ve placed this on GitHub: Issue 75.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Sybre Waaijer.

Hi @aitormendez,

There’s no description.. One also can’t be generated, because there’s no content.
The social description isn’t required per se on Facebook, but Twitter is much stricter in these things.

Always be sure to fill in a custom description if you have no content – this should solve the issue.

In an upcoming update I might be able to support player cards:
https://dev.twitter.com/cards/types
But I’m not sure at the moment if that requires a description too. Edit: It doesn’t require one ??

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Sybre Waaijer.

Ok! Thank you very much.

A last comment over this question. Is a bit confussing to have, in the description field, a placeholder text in grey, taken from title. Seems to be a default description taken by autodescription. So, seems no manual description needed ??

can I suggest to take this placeholder as a real description?

If not, the content of placeholder should be a default placeholder without relation with real content. Something like “Put here your description”.

I think this rule should be right for all other fields too.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Aitor Méndez.

Hi Aitor,

This is my mistake: It’s still not clear enough within the admin area.
I wish to resolve this with a future Social Optimization patch. Where you see exactly what’s going to happen.

What happens now is the following:
1. If the description is not social, then the placeholder is 100% as is.
2. If the description is social, then the “title on blogname” is not shown.

1. Normal auto-description maxes out on 155 characters.
2. Social auto-description maxes out on 200 characters.

To benefit from the additional length, you should use the Excerpt field or add actual content – for now.

Placeholders will always show the expected output (after save, for now).
In the future I will add a heartbeat sensor and refresh button for live updates on the placeholders.

Since 2.8, if you click a placeholder, on most browsers, it should become “vague/misty”. I might make this an on-hover effect, but on that I’d wish to see some feedback first :). I could also make it much more pretty, but that’s a design effort on its own; rather than usability/accessibility.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Sybre Waaijer.

Thank you for the answer. I do not understand completely. What means “social” and “normal auto-description”. And how can I toggle between normal/social?

Thanks!

Hi Aitor,

The social and normal description are defined as such:

Normal:
1. For Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.
2. Maybe for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Social:
1. Only for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

The Normal Description is output on your site in a meta tag, namely description.

The Social Description is also output on your site in various meta tags, namely og:description and twitter:description. Most, if not all, social sites listen to the og:description meta tag. Twitter listens to the og: data, if no twitter: data is found.

The toggling happens automatically.
For most sites, Google has a description width limit defined by 155 characters.
Facebook, through og: has a character limit, which is 200 characters.

The automated description for social sites excludes “ugly” data, like the title and description — which are only helpful on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

The reason it’s excluded in the social description is not only because it’s “ugly”, but those social websites don’t have a search engine targeted at such data. They merely output “exactly” what is given. Duplicating the keywords in the title is therefore redundant.

I hope this explains the lot even further ?? If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

Hi @aitormendez,

Ignore whatever I’ve written before.
I completely forgot about the photo card type. Sorry about that!

This issue will be fixed in 2.8.2 ??
I just pushed the commit.

Stay tuned!

Ok! Thanks again, for the update and the detailed explanation.

Hi, Sybre, sorry for reopen this thread. I need to ask you something new.

After 2.8.2 update The twitter card image format only works in single tweet view. In the front timeline, the same tweet is not showing the featured image.

This is an example of tweet in the front timeline (is shown without image):

This is the same tweet in single tweet view:

Is it possible to get a tweet with image in the front timeline too?

Many thanks!

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Aitor Méndez.

@cybr

Hi @aitormendez,

My apologies! I completely missed this thread.

It seems that the implementation I did for 2.8.2 was deprecated by Twitter. So I had to revert it and clean it all up in 2.9 ??

Since I’m recently also active on Twitter, I noticed that they do not always render images when it’s visible in the feed. This is a fluke, and it’s an issue with their parsing services.

If the original problem reoccurs with 2.9 or if you have any more Twitter feature suggestions, do let me know in a new thread!

Thanks ??