dynamic <title> tag

mattylamb · 14-02-06

Hi all, sorry but this is probably going to be a stupid question but as a php/design noob its one I'm struggling with.

on my dvd site, i have 2 pages .. searchTitles.php and fetchPrices.php which are passed variables e.g.. searchTitles.php?title=batman

or fetchPrices.php?movie=mfno123546

The issue is that at the moment i have several hundred instances of fetchPrices.php indexed by google, but the title and description of each page is the same. I want to have the dvd movie title in the <title> tag so i can make these pages different based on the content from the feed.

anyone know how I can acheieve this?

giveasyouget · 14-02-06

it's quite easy really - in the first case if the title field contains evering you need then edit your 'searchtitles.php'
where it says

Quote:

echo "<title>yoursitename</title>";

you change it to

Quote:

echo "<title>$title - yoursitename</title>";

(if it's not in an echo statement you'll probably need something like:

Quote:

<title><? echo $title ?> yoursitename</title>

for the second one u will need to look up the title in your database based on the movie= code, and then put out the <title> tag after you know what it is.

mattylamb · 14-02-06

thanks mate, will get to work on it. cheers

lowndsy · 14-02-06

You need to move the html around in fetchprices.php to be displayed after the product title has been extracted from the xml. Then you can just put $dvdTitle in the title tags and it should work.

You need to find something like this

switch ($name) {
case "TITLE":

and put all the header info straight after that, from <html> all the way through to <body> and the basic page template. I'd move it into a seperate file and put it in fetchprices with a PHP include.
It will slow the page down though - nothing will get written to the page until the xml file has beeen parsed.

mattylamb · 15-02-06

with some great help from Lowndsy it is working. thanks all!

DutchRomano · 15-02-06

Could someone post the lines of code which need to be altered ? Thanks

DutchRomano

lowndsy · 15-02-06

I did it by editing MattyLambs code directly, and I don't actually use the medifusion dvd feed myself so I don't actually have the code to post here (and I don't want to publish Mattys code for obvious reasons). When I add the same changes to my game sites I'll post my page here.
It's like I said in the post above - the xml is parsed in a big switch statement - with each case housing the action for the different types of data the xml could contain. You need to write the the page title to the screen after the data has been pulled from medifusion rather than having it right at the top of your code where it usually is...
Just find the case statement marked TITLE and put all of your html, from the very first <HTML> all the way through to everything which appears before the products are displayed in there. I'd consolidate it into a seperate file but you don't have to.
There are 2 switch statements - one containing the visual elements (that's the one you're looking for) and another one which just assigns some varibles to the right places - pretty hard to get them mixed up - just pick the one containing HTML.