Multiple OG article:section tags not supported by Facebook

Hi technabob,

I’m sorry for my late reply.

Initially, the default behavior was to generate only one ‘article:section’ meta tag using the *first* category as returned by the relevant WP API call. This way, if the post had multiple categories, only the one that was on the top of the alphabetically ordered list was used. I had received feedback to change this, so the default functionality changed.

The current functionality leads to the problem you described, if multiple categories have been set.

In this case there is no right or wrong. Facebook supports one ‘article:section’, while WordPress supports multiple.

The only workaround that makes sense is to use only *one* category on your posts, if full compatibility with Facebook is the goal.

I’m afraid this functionality won’t be changed. But I’ll see what can be done by providing a filter hook so as to be able to fix it with a custom filtering function.

George

In the upcoming 2.8.4, if multiple categories are used per post, it will be possible to filter the list of categories by attaching a filtering function to the ‘amt_post_categories_for_opengraph’ and ‘amt_post_categories_for_schemaorg’ filter hooks.

If you need sample code, please let me know.

I’m marking this topic as resolved.

George

Thanks, George. I’m definitely not going to be cutting back on the number of categories I use, but would love to be able to set just a single section in the og tags for Facebook, since they’re the number one consumer of that data for us.

Hi technabob.

I see. Here is some sample code that returns only the first category for Opengraph generator:

function amt_opengraph_force_one_section( $categories ) {
    if ( ! empty($categories) ) {
         return array_slice($categories, 0, 1);
    }
    return $categories;
}
add_filter( 'amt_post_categories_for_opengraph', 'amt_opengraph_force_one_section' );

Hope this helps. (will be valid in 2.8.4)

George