Comments on: How to optimise page titles in phpBB

By: Mathew Davies

Mathew Davies — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:25:46 +0000

This makes sense on so many levels, I don’t understand why it’s the other way round by default. A website I visit has a long name so if you had 2 + tabs open you couldn’t tell which tab linked to which page, Annoying.

I’ve done the same for Vanilla so if anyone wants to do the same, here’s what you need to change :

1 : Open /themes/head.php

2 : Reverse the order of variables in the title element.

You should end up with something similar to what I have below.

‘.$this->Context->PageTitle.’ – ‘.$this->Context->Configuration['APPLICATION_TITLE'].’

By: Rob Cubbon

Rob Cubbon — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:30:02 +0000

Thanks a lot. I did 3 of the 4 recommendations. Could not find language’/lang_english/lang_main.php in my phpBB3 files. Just like with blogs it’s good to put blog post titles before site titles I’m sure it’s good to put topic and forum titles before board titles. Thanks!

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:53:32 +0000

Fred – Sounds like it could well do. Please bear in mind, this is an old article and refers to version 2.x of phpBB.

By: Fred

Fred — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:09:14 +0000

Have you tried this: “phpBB3 SEO Advanced mod Rewrite” from phpbb3-seo website? It looks like doing the job,no?

By: Edward

Edward — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:04:46 +0000

Is the number of words in the title an issue? For example, should you take out things like “View topic”?

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:11:36 +0000

I have tried the phpBB3 mods by Jeremy and they work perfectly! Thanks for the valuable info. I suppose I now need to make a new XML sitemap and resubmit it to Google and see what they make of the changes.

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:20:39 +0000

Jeremy – Thanks for the update; that certainly helps bring this article back up to date

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:51:55 +0000

Outstanding Article! I’d always hated the page titles, but I’d never looked into a mod to change them. If only I’d known it was this easy… I just did this mod for phpBB3, so I’ll give a few pointers that would have sped things up for me.

You still change the viewtopic.php and viewforum.php files, as mentioned above, but you have to change the page_header() calls instead, as Weasel mentioned ( THANKS Weasel! ).
Before: page_header($user->lang['VIEW_FORUM'] . ‘ – ‘ . $forum_data['forum_name']);
After: page_header($forum_data['forum_name']);
&
Before: page_header($user->lang['VIEW_TOPIC'] .’ – ‘ . $topic_data['topic_title']);
After: page_header($topic_data['topic_title']);

The language file to edit is totally different in phpBB3. You need to go to forum/language/en/common.php
Before: ‘INDEX’ => ‘Index page’,
After: ‘INDEX’ => ‘New Title’,

Hope it’s okay that I posted this here. This really helped me out, so I wanted to share with others, too. Please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes. This seems to be working fine for me, though.

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:42:07 +0000

Weasel – Thanks for the advice; I still haven’t moved over to phpBB 3 so I am sure that will help some readers.

By: Weasel

Weasel — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 23:28:11 +0000

If anybody still cares about how to modify page titles in phpBB3 — there is a function called page_header() which sets the PAGE_TITLE. The solution is in the files mentioned in the article above, but in page_header() calls.
Regards.