put the content of a single post into og:description

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I’d like to have the content of the current single post loaded into the og:description meta property – but the '. $content .' doesn’t output anything?

This is what’s in my header.php

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if (is_single()) {

$content = get_the_content();
$desc='<meta property="og:description" content="'. $content .'" />';
echo $desc;
}

What could the problem be?

Post Views: 8

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2 comments

  1. get_the_content() must be inside the loop, in header.php you can do this (don’t forget to scape the content to use it as attribute):

     if (is_single()) {
    while (have_posts()) {
        the_post();
        $content = get_the_content();
        $desc='<meta property="og:description" content="'. esc_attr($content) .'">';
        echo $desc;
    }
 }

    or even better, in your functions.php hook the wp_head action; also, I recomend using the excerpt instead of the content as descriptoin. (note the use of global $post and setup_postdata).

     add_action( 'wp_head', 'my_wp_head' );
 function my_wp_head() {
     if (is_single()) {
         $post_id = get_queried_object_id():
         $excerpt = get_the_excerpt( $post_id );
         $desc = '<meta property="og:description" content="Blabla'. esc_attr( $excerpt ) .'">';
         echo $desc;
      }
      //More stuff to put in <head>
  }

  2. See the codex page for get_the_content():

    Description
    Retrieve the post content. (Must be used in a Loop)

    Emphasis on »Must be used in a Loop«.

    Edit:

    To give you a possible solution, you can use get_post(), for pages and posts, like shown below, to get the post content outside the loop.

    $post_id = get_queried_object_id();
$post_obj = get_post( $post_id );
$content = $post_obj->post_content;

    Update:

    There is a pretty interesting comparison by Peter Knight regarding the Differences between using get_post() and WP_Query(). I can’t replicate it all, but basically it boils down to: performance and amount of available data. A short not at all conclusive and complete aggregation could be: on the one hand, with WP_Query you have the meta data too, not the case with get_post, but on the other hand, with WP_Query there are four database queries, whereas you have one database query using get_post. So there definitely are some differences to consider, read the article for more information, which method is right depends on what is needed for the actual use case on hand.

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