I’ve been working on a new version of a website I currently have up and running (and has been for a few years now) but this is running old software that seems to have been falling apart.
Anyhow, I am now in the process of upgrading to the new version of PHPBB3.x, and I’m trying to get the look and feel spot on, and one of the problems I had with the out of the box package of PHPBB3 is the way META Titles are displayed.
In my opinion, all page titles on bulletin boards should begin with [Topic Title] | [Site Name] but for some strange reason PHPBB does [Site Name] Viewtopic/Viewforum [Topic Title].
Now I feel when people search sites like Google, they will type in exactly what they want to find, and the more info you can get into the title, the better, so removing Viewtopic/Viewforum will give you that extra bit of space, plus putting the topic title first, means there is less chance of search engines cutting the title short (may chop your website name off short though, but this doesn’t matter too much)
To do the above, follow these steps:
To remove Viewforum
Open viewforum.php
Find
page_header($user->lang['VIEW_FORUM'] . ' - ' . $forum_data['forum_name'], true, $forum_id);
Replace
page_header($forum_data['forum_name'], true, $forum_id);
To Remove View Topic:
Open viewtopic.php
Find
page_header($user->lang['VIEW_TOPIC'] . ' - ' . $topic_data['topic_title'], true, $forum_id);
Replace
page_header($topic_data['topic_title'], true, $forum_id);
This worked absolutely fine, but as you yourself said in your article, it will make more sense when we have topic first and then the site name. Can you please tell us how can we achieve that?