There should be some area in the CMS where you can edit a default title "appendage". For example, if I'm building my site, I don't want the title of my page to be just "Home" - I might want it to be "Home | Bandit Website", and have that " | Bandit Website" appended to the end of every title within my site, rather than having to manually add it to each page.

Thoughts?

I agree.

Perhaps we have something in the _config.php like:

global $siteTitle;
$siteTitle = 'My cool site';

Then, inside the code which generates <title></title> ($MetaTags) we include the global $siteTitle variable.

That's just a rough guess on how we could do it. Sam, perhaps you have some thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Sean

My solution to this problem was to put it in the template.

In head of Page.ss I have:
[html]
<title>$Title.XML - $SiteName</title>

$MetaTags(false)

[/html]

and in _config.php I put

$SiteName = "Nathan's Wondiferous Website";

Passing 'false' to $MetaTags is supposed to exclude the title, so you can put it in yourself.
Unfortunately, it seems to broken last I checked - you'll need to go into the MetaTags function in SiteTree and tell it to look for the strings 'true' and 'false' instead of booleans, since the template passes your false as a string.

How about actually removing the <title> generation from the $MetaTags function, so a site developer has control over the <title> attribute themselves, as well as being able to include $MetaTags for <meta></meta>.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Sean

Yeah, that makes alot more sense to me...not so good for backwards compatability of templates, though.

I've noticed this behaviour with template designers, especially when they don't assume $MetaTags generates the <title> element of the page... Your idea seems the best, since it's backwards compatible. So you have to check for 'false', rather than simply false?

Cheers,
Sean

I just changed the function to this:

public function MetaTags($includeTitle = 'true') {
    $tags = "";
    if($includeTitle == 'true') {
        $tags .= "<title>" . Convert::raw2xml($this->MetaTitle ? $this->MetaTitle : $this->Title) . "</title>\n";
    }
    $tags .= "<meta name=\"generator\" http-equiv=\"generator\" content=\"SilverStripe 2.0 - http://www.silverstripe.com\" />\n";
		
    $charset = ContentNegotiator::get_encoding();
    $tags .= "<meta http-equiv=\"Content-type\" content=\"text/html; charset=$charset\" />\n";
    if($this->MetaKeywords) {
        $tags .= "<meta name=\"keywords\" http-equiv=\"keywords\" content=\"" . Convert::raw2att($this->MetaKeywords) . "\" />\n";
    }
    if($this->MetaDescription) {
        $tags .= "<meta name=\"description\" http-equiv=\"description\" content=\"" . Convert::raw2att($this->MetaDescription) . "\" />\n";
    }
    return $tags;
}

It's all in the first three lines - just treat $includeTitle as a string, and pre-set $tags to avoid errors. Although this way, you could do $MetaTags(oneonewasaracehorse) and it would work, too...

I was more suggesting a solution that didn't require hacking the code - I would have thought having a custom title would be a pretty wide-spread requirement of any website :P