Issue when using post title as description

[Toast707]

Hi,

I'm currently trying to get AIO seo to use the post title as the description, but I'm having a bit of difficulty.

I've tried using both %post_title% and %wp_title% but neither are displaying. Is this a common issue?

Currently using php 7.1.7. WP version 4.8

[michaeltorbert]

From preliminary testing, it looks like there may be a bug that causes the meta description to only show up if something is entered in the SEO description field for the post, regardless of the description template settings.
We should test (and look at the code) to determine any other conditions, and then see if it's a new problem or has been there for a while.

[Toast707]

@michaeltorbert Hey, good to know it's not only me. Do you know what custom field the the descriptions are stored as?

[michaeltorbert]

@Toast707 The field is _aioseop_description but that's only for manually entered ones. Otherwise they're generated dynamically (on the fly) and not stored in the database.

[Toast707]

Yeah, I was just looking for a temporary work-around until it gets patched. Thanks for the heads up; looking forward to the update. I'll close the issue.

[michaeltorbert]

Reopening, as this is a legitimate bug.

[Toast707]

Sorry about that; I wasn't under the impression I was the first to post this issue.

[wpsmort]

@michaeltorbert I tested on a new install with the current live version of AIOSEOP. There was no meta description until I activated the Autogenerate Descriptions option. Once I activated that option, the meta description was generated from my post excerpt or the post content as expected.

I then changed the Description Format to %post_title% and got the following meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Test post with excerpt | testsite" />

The above is the post title and site title which is a potential issue because I didn't use %blog_title% in the Description Format field. If I use %post_title% | %blog_title% in the Description Format field then I get the site title output twice.

I also tested with %wp_title% and that worked perfectly fine.

In fact I tested all the supported strings listed in the help for the Description Format field and they all worked fine with that one exception of the %post_title% including the site title.

The only other issue was that the placeholder text in the Description field in AIOSEOP did not show the correct description as per the format I selected, instead it always showed my post excerpt text.

[contactashish13]

@wpsmort PR: #1421 solves part of the issue i.e. when you specify %post_title% in the description, now it will not add the blog title as the suffix.

Also seems related to #1408