My first WordPress plugin: HeadMeta

Mark Pilgrim was in the #wordpress IRC channel earlier, asking if there was some way to add <link> and <meta> tags to the <head> section of a page for specific posts. It seems he wants to control how various search engines and other bots index individual posts. I replied that he could do this using the custom fields feature.

A short while later, I had written my first plugin for WordPress: HeadMeta: .ZIP, .tar.gz, .phps, .txt.

To use this plugin, you add key/value pairs in the Advanced Editing interface. In particular, you’ll want to add keys named “head_link” and “head_meta”. The value will be plugged into the generated <link> or <meta> tag. For example, if you added the following keys and values:

Key	Value
head_link	rel=”seealso” href=”http://example.com/movies/”
head_meta	name=”keywords” content=”entertainment,movies”

This would generate two tags in the <head> of the page, when someone visited the permalink for the post:


<link rel="seealso" href="http://example.com/movies/" />
<meta name="keywords" content="entertainment,movies" />

This will be useful for any situation where you want special <link> or <meta> tags generated for specific posts.

UPDATE 2005/07/14: I’ve updated the plugin to version 1.1, which adds a new feature: if you have a key named “keyword” or “keywords”, it will automatically generate a standard “keywords” meta tag. For example, if you have the following custom field:

Key	Value
keyword	pets, dogs, canines, training

The result would be:


<meta name='keywords' content='pets, dogs, canines, training' />

UPDATE 2005/10/15: I updated with a bugfix. The new version is 1.2.

UPDATE 2007/02/05: Version 1.3 is the newest version, which is now WordPress 2.1 compatible (it should still work with older versions, as well). Thanks to Gerald for pointing out the problem!

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