Redmine › Meta

Download Meta 0.2.2

Meta is one of those plugins, which need to modify very core view files to provide their functionality. In particular this plugin modifies the layouts/base view file, which is used for every HTML view of Redmine. In Redmine world, though, it’s assumed to be a bad practice to modify files like these, but, unfortunately, I had no other choice.

It’s a bad practice because view files like layouts/base can be changed in new versions of Redmine, what can end up with plugin’s view files and core view files conflicting. This happenned to the Meta plugin and Redmine 2.3.x – the plugin was making the application inoperative. So the very main feature of Meta 0.2.2 is support for Redmine 2.3.x!

To get the content for the Meta description the plugin just truncates the textual content associated with the page. Usually this is a Wiki content (e.g., Wiki-enabled description for issues). There were no issues with this in the pure Redmine, but some third-party plugins, which extended the Wiki syntax, appeared to produce errors. Thus, the Wiki Extensions plugin used to add errors into the Meta descroption (see #2188). So version 0.2.2 also does its best to avoid having such errors in the Meta description.

To be able to generate the Meta description for news and Wiki pages the plugin adds two new hooks (a kind of function calls) to corresponding views (files). The version 0.2.2 of the plugin also makes these hooks available in the Hooks Manager, if this my other plugin is installed. This way you will be able to use these hooks for adding custom content to news and Wiki pages.