Genesis, Yoast, and Simple:Press

[bhale]

I'm having problems getting Simple:Press forums to work correctly since moving my site over to the Genesis framework. I'm using the Yoast SEO plugin.

My forums are here: http://elitegamingcomputers.com/forum/

The problem (I think) is with the Title tags. If you go to the forums and view the page source, you can see that the forums are generating the title without the title tags.

Also, it's adding a strange space above the header and displaying the title of the current forum page in that space. And, the browser title is just showing the url rather than the page title.

I can play around with the SEO settings to make it so the gray bar doesn't show up and that it displays "Forums" as the page title. But if I do that it displays "Forums" for every forum page and topic and I want it to show the topic title to avoid the duplicate title penalty from Google.

I've seen a few other people with this problem doing a Google search, but none of the problems have really been answered. Simple:Press makes you pay $36 for three months of support, which I had paid once (it expired) and I don't really want to pay it again.

The answer on this page seems like it would work:

http://bonplangratos.fr/forum/bon-plan-entre-geeks/yoast-wordpress-seo-how-to-display-title-of-your-simplepress-post

However, I think the Genesis framework treats the title tag differently because when I go into my header.php the <title> <php wp_title ();?> isn't there and I saw this on the Simple:Press twitter page:

https://twitter.com/SimpleForum/status/382005591842889728

I'm sure there's a simple solution to this, but I don't really know any php, so I don't know what the work around is. If anyone could help me that would be awesome.

http://elitegamingcomputers.com

[essaysnark]

Right now that page is not outputting a title tag at all. It sounds like you have three plugins that are trying to handle SEO settings. That's complicated. Maybe try disabling Yoast to see if you can get away without it? Genesis handles the basics of SEO pretty well already (and yes, Genesis does things differently in terms of how themes are constructed). Maybe someone else here is running Simple Forums but I haven't seen it mentioned much.

[bhale]

Hi essay, thanks for responding!

I've tried disabling Yoast and all other plugins, but the problem happens regardless. And, I'd prefer to keep Yoast. I had Yoast and Simple:Press working before I moved over to Genesis (and Synthesis hosting).

I'd like to keep Simple:Press because they have a bunch of options, but they've been a pain to integrate from the start. And, I don't really want to pay them $36 to answer a single question. If it comes to that, I'd rather just move to a different forum solution.

I contacted StudioPress support and they mentioned that I could modify the PHP code in my functions.php file to handle the title differently, but unfortunately they couldn't help me with the code and I don't have any experience with PHP to be able to do it on my own.

In the tweet I linked to above, Simple:Press acknowledged the difference in how different themes/plugins handle the wp_title and they seem to have suggested that it can be fixed with a "hook update." So, I was hopeful that that meant that I could add a hook to fix the problem.

[essaysnark]

I've poked around on this for about half an hour but it's not an easy fix (especially since I don't have experience working with this particular plugin). The fact that it was working before with Yoast means that the instructions you linked to for changing header.php aren't relevant (those are for people who couldn't make Simple work with Yoast, but that's not you). I've never heard of Genesis filtering the wp_title thing in a way that causes problems but that seems to be where the disconnect is with your theme and this plugin.

Maybe someone else around here can help, but my bet is that you're going to either get support from SimplePress or migrate off to something else. We use bbPress with Genesis just fine; this page looks pretty thorough in providing migration instructions: http://9seeds.com/tech/moving-forums-from-simplepress-to-bbpress/

Sorry that I couldn't be of more help.

[bhale]

I decided that going with bbPress was the best route. Already switched over.

Not the answer I was looking for originally, but probably the best solution in the end.

Thanks again for helping!

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