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!
