SEO Metatags Hack for Boonex Dolhin Smart Community Builder

19Aug08

I have to say i really dislike this script. It’s one of there ready made scripts that you can easily install and get running. But to be honest, how often do you use a script unmodified? If you are used to Drupal, the documentation and community support for Boonex Dolphin is a nightmare. Sometimes you don’t have a choice for picking the right script. It’s more what the customers wants. Actually there is nothing in Boonex Dolphin that can not be done with Drupal.

Anyway, here is my hack:

I found out that there is no way to change the metatags in Boonex Dolphin other than a global setting for additional pages other than profiles. That means all the metatags are the same. That’s an SEO nightmare. I call it a hack cause it’s bad style programming. But it’s quick and easy. So here is what you have to change. There is just one file involved:

/inc/design.inc.php

Basically we are creating a case condition. Depending on the requested URL we will display different metatags. These metatags are hardcoded in that file. As i said it’s just a hack. Ideally there should an admin interface for storing the metatags in der database.

Find these lines and replace them:

case ‘meta_keywords’:     $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaKeyWords”) ); break;
case ‘meta_description’:  $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaDescription”) ); break;

What you want to do here is to hook another case condition inside the two cases. For the keywords it would look like this:

case ‘meta_keywords’:
switch( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) {
case ‘/page1.php’: $sRet = ‘key1.1, key1.2, key1.3, key1.4, key1.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/page2.php’: $sRet = ‘key2.1, key2.2, key2.3, key2.4, key2.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/page3.php’: $sRet = ‘key3.1, key3.2, key3.3, key3.4, key3.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/’: $sRet = ‘keyword frontpage, keyword frontpage two’; break;
case ‘/index.php’: $sRet = ‘keyword frontpage, keyword frontpage two‘; break;
default: $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaKeyWords”) ); break;
}
break;

As you can see the conditions for ‘/’ and ‘/index.php’ will result in the same output, thats because it’s they same frontpage. As a default you leave the original values. So when none of your conditions will be true, it will use the default function. That happen when all the profile pages get called. Same thing you want to do for meta_description.

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