I better get my self into gear and whip up some sort of a design for this baby. Anyone else want to join in?

The problem with default WordPress titles

The default WordPress title displays something like this:

[blog name] » [category name] » [post title]

There are two key problems here:

1. Item order: The order of the items in the title should read from most specific to least specific (left-to-right). So the post title should be first, and the blog title should be last. This makes them more readable and useful in lists of favourites, for example.
2. The separator: The separator shouldn’t be anything that needs to be escaped and it should be something that comes out nice in screenreaders, too. Here’s an article at 456 Berea Street regarding document titles and separators. I find this comment in particular to be most useful.

The solution

Let’s take a look at the standard code:

<title> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?> </title>

We’ll reshuffle this as follows:

<title> <?php wp_title(' '); ?> <?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' - '; } ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> </title>

So you can see the title of the current page/post comes first. ‘wp_title’ takes an empty string as a parameter; this parameter denotes the separator. We’re not using the default, and since we’ve reversed the order, we don’t need to display a separator at all.

We then have an ‘if’ statement that checks if the ‘wp-title’ holds a value and displays a separator, ‘ – ‘, if it does.

Lastly, we display the name of the blog with bloginfo(‘name’).

So now we get this in our title bar:

[post title] – [category name] – [blog name]

Much friendlier!

Some useful links

• Document titles and title separators.
• Template Tags/wp title – from the WordPress documentation
• How to use the title tag.