Question

I’m having a problem that I can’t seem to figure out, though I’m not sure if I’m on the right track. Can anyone please advise?

I’ve just created a wordpress website, that post’s will be shared on facebook.

I’m using featured images and I would like my featured image facebook thumbnail to be used.

It seems when I post a link to facebook, facebook just picks up images on the page and you can choose a thumbnail.

I’m not really up for that because the images are landscape and don’t look good. So I started looking into meta tag with the open graph property to see if I could dynamically populate the content that facebook captures when posting a link to the wall.

This is what I tried…

<meta name="description" content="" />
<meta name="author" content="" />
<meta charset="utf-8" /> 
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="0000000000000000" />

<?php if ( is_single() || is_page() ) { ?>

<meta property="og:title" content="<?php echo get_the_title(); ?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" />
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php $fbthumb = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'facebook-thumb' ); echo $fbthumb[0]; ?>" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="myblog.co.uk"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo get_the_excerpt(); ?>" />

<?php } ?>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

But all of this is ignored!!!

Can anyone help me understand how to control the content facebook draws in via a link being posted to a wall. I would appreciated your help very much.

Thanks

Answer 1

I had this problem the other day. Facebook wants og:images to be larger than 200px in both directions, or it will ignore them. I found I got the best result when I used wp_get_attachment_image_src($img.ID, 'large')

Have you tried looking at your site with the Facebook Debugger to see what it has to say about your site? https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug