Title tags not completely changing

Ok….after hours of trial and error of different codes…I finally figured it out.

Let me preface this by explaining my reasons. I have some pre-designed business cards I sell. When using the product grid, if I have the title include the words “Business Cards” at the end, then it is really easy for the title to get long and then bleed over into a new line. Visually to my OCD it looked odd. Besides, they are listed on a page for Business Cards already…people know what they are. So I wanted to figure out a way to dynamically strip the words “Business Cards” from the titles in the product grid. Using something like a str_replace doesn’t work if you’re using a theme widget like that. So my only option was to remove the words from the product title itself. That meant that I had to come up with a way to dynamically add the words back into the product page’s <title> and SEO meta tags so it gets picked up for a more relevant search result.

So here’s how I did it so it ONLY applies to a product in a specific category. Can be easily modified for all kinds of uses… Logically you’d think the theme hook should do this automatically since it changes it everywhere else. Maybe it was overlooked or is a bug. I can’t see why anyone would want to only change the SEO meta tag entries and not the <title> tag along with it to match.

// change the <title> tag
add_filter('document_title_parts', 'dq_override_post_title', 10);
function dq_override_post_title($title){
   // change title for predesigned bcards only
    if(is_product() && has_term( 'Business Cards', 'product_cat' )){ 
        // change title parts here
        $title['title'] = get_the_title().' Business Cards'; 
        $title['site'] = 'Spiderfly Studios'; //optional
    }

    return $title; 
}

Well…it’s more of a patch as the filter provided by your team shown above should do this. I would call this a bug as it changes the title everywhere but the <title> element in the header.