Custom Page Titles in Rails

Meaningful page titles are important as they can weigh heavily in your search engine ranking. Here’s a quick tip for adding custom page titles to your Rails app.

In the controller, create a @pagetitle instance variable on any actions that you wish to have a custom title.

class CountriesController < ApplicationController
  layout "big"

  def index
    @country= Country.find(:all)
    @pagetitle = "All Countries"
  end

end

And then in the view, add the following:

    <title>
        <% if @pagetitle %>
            <%= @pagetitle %> at
        <% else %>
            your tag line at
        <% end %>
        yoururl.com
    </title>

Obviously you should change ‘your tag line’ and ‘yoururl.com’ to suit. I read a similar post on this, which used the slightly more elegant:

<%= @pagetitle || "your tag line at your url.com">

The only problem I can see with this is that you can’t add a constant suffix to your page titles, e.g. “all countries at yoururl.com”, “something else at yoururl.com”, but in reality you could user either. Happy titleling.

~ by Alex on January 12, 2009.