Currently the meta description for bbpress is limited to the text up to the first line break. This means that for a forum post like this (https://300hours.com/f/careers/t/representation-of-cfa-on-a-level-1-failed-candidates/), the meta description is just [Hi guys,], which isn’t great and generates a lot of duplicate meta descriptions.

I’m trying to correct this by using a PHP snippet to counter this, basing it from a snippet I found (https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-to-include-a-meta-description-and-keywords-in-bbpress-without-a-plug-in/#post-80944), but I’m not having a lot of luck so far. Is there a filter that can tell the meta description to not stop at line breaks and apply this to only forum posts (i.e. not affect ‘regular’ WP posts)?

Thanks in advance for any help given!!!

[@robin-w Moderator 3 years, 2 months ago]

so are you using an seo plugin ?

[@zee300 Participant 3 years, 2 months ago]

Yes, RankMath. Is that what’s generating the meta description? I though (perhaps naively) that bbpress did that.

[@robin-w Moderator 3 years, 2 months ago]

bbpress doesn’t

[@zee300 Participant 3 years, 1 month ago]

Ah OK – I’ve just found out that RankMath simply extracts the bbpress topic excerpt and uses that for the meta description, i.e. bbp_topic_excerpt()

Is there a way to make bbp_topic_excerpt() ignore line breaks and increase character limit?

[@robin-w Moderator 3 years, 1 month ago]

untested, but this should take out newlines and change the excerpt length to 150 – just change the 150 in the code to whatever length you want.

so firstly you need to alter the default in wordpress which is 55 so

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'rew_change_default_length' ) ;

function rew_change_default_length () {
    return 150;
}

then alter it in the bbpress function, and change to take out line breaks

add_filter ('bbp_get_topic_excerpt' , 'rew_remove_line_breaks', 10 , 3) ;

function rew_remove_line_breaks ($excerpt, $topic_id, $length){
		$topic_id = bbp_get_topic_id( $topic_id );
		//change length here
		$length   = 150 ;
		$excerpt  = get_post_field( 'post_excerpt', $topic_id );

		if ( empty( $excerpt ) ) {
			$excerpt = bbp_get_topic_content( $topic_id );
		}

		$excerpt = trim( strip_tags( $excerpt ) );
		
		//take out line breaks
		$excerpt = preg_replace("/\r|\n/", "", $excerpt);

		// Multibyte support
		if ( function_exists( 'mb_strlen' ) ) {
			$excerpt_length = mb_strlen( $excerpt );
		} else {
			$excerpt_length = strlen( $excerpt );
		}

		if ( ! empty( $length ) && ( $excerpt_length > $length ) ) {
			$excerpt  = mb_substr( $excerpt, 0, $length - 1 );
			$excerpt .= '…';
		}
		
		
		// Filter & return
		return apply_filters( 'rew_get_topic_excerpt', $excerpt, $topic_id, $length );
}

Put this in your child theme’s function file –

ie wp-content/themes/%your-theme-name%/functions.php

where %your-theme-name% is the name of your theme

or use

Code Snippets