Hello Tim,

It's actually necessary for us to escape the characters that are added into the meta data because your users might abuse this by performing xss attacks via the blog post. By the way, search engines would automatically treat & as an ampersand & So you don't really have to worry about it.

Hello Mark,

I understand the escaping characters to prevent xss attacks. the issue we were seeing is when adding a link to a third party website (like Facebook) it would pull the meta description instead of the "og:description" tag.

We were wondering why the meta description and the og:description do not match. It looks like the meta description is being populated by the content of the blog and the "og:description" is being populated by the "Meta Description" user field in the "Metadata" section in the EasyBlog entry.

The description added in the "Meta Description" user field in the "Metadata" section in the EasyBlog entry does not contain "" "&" or any other HTML character entities so it looks like it should in the "og:description". However, the meta description does contain these characters.

Thank You for you time,
Timothy

Hello Timothy,

If the blog post has a meta description, it will use the meta description, otherwise it will use the blog post's text as the og:description . If there is an og:description, I believe Facebook will use that rather than relying on the meta tags. Am I misunderstanding something here?

Hello Mark,

It looks like the only tag that uses the "meta description" user field is "og:description". Both the "twitter:description" and 'meta name="description"' use the blog posts text.

As far as Facebook:
For some reason Facebook uses meta description tag first and then after it caches the page it will start using the "og:description" tag. That is a Facebook problem and are at their mercy on that.

Thank you for your time,
Timothy

Hello Mark,

Excellent. That fixed the Meta Description but the "twitter:description" tag is still using the blog content and not the "Met Description" user field.

And will I need to Document this change? Will an update overwrite this or will Stackideas make this change?

Thank You so much for you time!!!
Timothy

Hello,

Can you try to upload this file into /components/com_easyblog/helpers/ and overwrite the twitter.php file?

You are the man Mark. That did it.

Are these changes going to be in the next update or do I need to document these changes and make them after updating?

Thank You for your time,
Timothy

Yep, they are added internally as well