Replacement for Page Title Widget

[Mark Blair]

Hello all, I updated to Genesis 2.0 and I installed the new eleven40 Pro theme and it is missing one thing that I previously used. I had the "Page Title" widget installed which allowed me to add some HTML to the tagline of the blog. With the latest version, "Page Title" is no longer available. Now eleven40 Pro shows the blogs tagline and it can only accept text and not HTML.

Does anyone know of a good replacement for this? I would like to do more with the tagline than plain text. I also noticed the tagline font size is rather large for my liking and the nice thing about it accepting HTML is you can adjust that. I am still using the eleven40 theme 1.1 in case you want to see what my tagline with the "Page Title" widget looks like.

http://www.markblair.net

Thanks everyone! 🙂

http://www.markblair.net

[Mark Blair]

I incorrectly referred to this as a widget. The "Page Title" option was simply a part of the theme in the widgets section. It is found under the Primary and Secondary Sidebar options with the old theme.

[aimee]

Hi, Mark, I was also struggling with this change today. If anyone has any insight, that'd be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Aimee

[Mark Blair]

Hi Aimee,

I did find one possible solution by editing the CSS. Enable the theme and then go to Appearance > Editor. Inside there search for .site-description. Below is what your file should look like. All I did was change the "font-size" line (I lowered the font size to 22 from 30) and I added a line to make the text italics. I still would like some way to add HTML code in that area as I had a script I was running in the past. This may be possible via CSS but I am not 100% sure.

.site-description {
	border-bottom: double #ddd;
	border-top: double #ddd;
	font-family: 'Lora', serif;
	font-size: 30px;
	overflow: hidden;
	margin: 40px 0 0;
	margin: 4rem 0 0;
	padding: 24px 0;
	padding: 2.4rem;
	text-align: center;

[aimee]

Hey, Mark, thanks for that. I was able to select for styling, but like you, I'd like to modify the actual content in the .site-description. I'm sure we're not the only ones, especially since this was a great feature in the prior version of Eleven40.

Good luck, and let me know if you find a solution! I'll do the same.

Aimee

[Mark Blair]

Aimee, I found a potential fix to this but I have yet to implement it successfully. According to the following two pages, you can add HTML to the tagline by making some changed to the header.php template. Problem is, there is no header.php template for eleven40 Pro. There is one in the Genesis core but every one of those templates says not to touch them and even after I tried a few things, I still can't get this to work.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/html-in-taglines-possible?replies=1#post-1993579
http://englishmike.net/2008/07/03/wordpress-quick-tips-2-embedding-html-in-blog-titles-and-descriptions/

Now, the real problem here is that I cannot find the bloginfo(‘description’) code that is supposed to be in this header.php file. The second link above (which is the fix - the first link just talks about it) mentions that it might not be in header.php. I still cannot find the right place to make this change.

Maybe if others see this they will know how to implement this change. It sure would be nice to be able to use HTML in the tagline.

[aimee]

Hey, Mark. Yes, there has to be a fairly simple solution to this, and we know it's out there somewhere. But what do you think about this workaround? In lieu of placing HTML in the possibly unmodify-able site-description area, what do you think about inserting your own full-width widget beneath the header? In my case, I'd like to put different content in each site-description area, based on the page, so this option works well.

Carrie Dils offers an easy solution for this, and it does work in Eleven40 pro -- just gave it a whirl.

It gets me to wondering how important the site-description area is for SEO and whether it would be a big disadvantage to simply replace it with our own widget area if we can't modify it.

Aimee

[Mark Blair]

Hmm, I like the idea. And I tried something similar a few days ago but I backed out when it caused my site to look all messed up. I am trying to follow the instructions on the page you linked to and so far it is not working. The second part where she talks about the mp_cta_genesis code does not mention where that actually should go. Based on the rest of her post, I assume it is intended for the function.php file. I tried that and so far nothing new is showing up.

I am still playing with this and hope that this will work.

I saw in another post on this forum where someone turned off the visibility of the tagline, although the text was still there. So maybe for SEO purposes if the tagline exists it will be captured by Google and having it hidden will help with the code from Carrie Dils!? Stuff to try out I suppose. 🙂

[Mark Blair]

I was able to figure out how to get the code from Carrie Dils' site working. I modified it to match what I wanted but it is still not perfect. Even with the CSS setup properly the text and code I have in the new widgets is not formatting as they should. I think this is going in the right direction and I will play with this more as I have some time. 🙂

Thanks for providing this info!

[Bill Murray]

Here's a simple thing that should work in your child theme's functions.php. Just replace the text returned with your desired text, including markup.

Note the code is untested (but it should work), and if you aren't comfortable editing code, don't. You can break your site with a small typo. Be careful that quotes should be straight, up and down, not angled - note that the editor on the forum converts straight quotes, so you'll have to fix this manually.

function change_tagline($description) {
return 'put the exact string you want output as your tagline, including markup here';
}
add_filter('option_blogdescription','change_tagline');

---

Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform

We do managed WordPress hosting.

[Mark Blair]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the additional information. I followed your instructions and for me, at least on my site, what this does is replace what's currently in my tagline with the code I enter where it says return ‘put the exact string you want output as your tagline, including markup here’;

So, because I put HTML in that spot it shows the HTML code and doesn't actually do anything with it. Basically it looks like a normal text box. Others may get different results but this is at least what happens when I tried this.

Thanks again! 🙂

[Terry]

I think in the theme you're using, that area isn't a page title but the site description or tagline.

A blog post I did the other day may help here .

Hope this helps!

[aimee]

Hi, Terry. This is great information. To take it a step further, how would one have different .site-description content on select pages?

Thank you!

[Terry]

Hi aimee,
Sure, you could add a conditional to test for the page or post or category to the changes in the functions.php. Lots of ways to skin that cat.

The silly example below tests for home page (is_home()), a category of red(in_category()), a certain page (is_page()) with different descriptions for all. It works for the specific category ids and post/page ids I used.

function child_seo_site_description() {

	if ( is_home() ) {

			echo '<h2 class="site-description">Home Page description here</h2>';

	} elseif (in_category('003')) {

			echo '<h2 class="site-description">Red Page description here</h2>';

	} elseif (is_page('13')) {

			echo '<h2 class="site-description">Test 1 Page description here</h2>';

	} else {
    
    	echo '<h2 class="site-description">Insert new description here</h2>';
	}
}

Hope this helps!

[aimee]

YES! THIS is what I'm talking about, Terri. Bill, I think we have our answer. Thank you!

Aimee

[Terry]

Fantastic, glad it worked for you!

[Mark Blair]

Terry,

Thank you for this information. Unfortunately I'm having problems. 🙁 I tried the first bit of code you have on your site and it changed the entire "tagline" background to be dark and forced the text to the left. I may have been able to modify it but I then tried the second part of the code you mentioned. That did exactly what I was looking for... except... it showed the tagline twice. I had the original one I added in the General section and the one from your code. I removed the tagline from the General section and it removed both. I added it back and now both are showing again. How can I just get one tagline with HTML?

[Terry]

Mark,
Sorry but for some reason, I can't right click and view in Chrome Dev Tools or Firebug, so hard to offer suggestions.

The reason the "tagline" background turned dark and moved could be because your class styling is different or named differently. I can't see any of that so can only guess. When I created the blog post, trying different things I did run into that.
Again guessing, try the second version on my blog post which also moves the "tagline" to genesis_before_content_sidebar_wrap.

Let me know how that works.

Terry

[Mark Blair]

Hi Terry,

Sorry I had a plugin enabled to disable right clicking. 🙂 I just tried again by using the second version on your blog (that's what I was using earlier as well) and then removing the tagline under Settings > General. This time it worked. 🙂 I only see one tagline (the one from your code) and it has what I wanted in it.

I have left off the plugin I mentioned above in case you wanted to see anything by right-clicking. Thanks again for all your help and for everyone's assistance throughout this thread. 🙂

[Terry]

Hi Mark,
It sounds like your problem is solved, fantastic!
Best of Luck & Take Care!
Terry

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