MediaWiki Tricks

MediaWiki Tricks

Changing the <title> of a page

I wanted my user page to have the title "Tim Styles" when displayed by search engines, but the MediaWiki default produced "User:Tim - Tim's website". I had a look at various options, such as MediaWiki:pagetitle, but this affects all pages. In the end I modified the PHP file (mediawiki/skins/Modern.php in my case) as follows:

<title><?php $this->text('pagetitle') ?></title>

<title><?php
    if (strpos($this->data['pagetitle'],"User:Tim") === false) {
        $this->text('pagetitle');
    } else {
        echo "Tim Styles";
    }
?></title>

You can do the same thing for the Main Page. Just change the second line above to the following:

    if (strpos($this->data['pagetitle'],"Main Page") === false) {

This will not affect the name of the Main Page, just the <title>, which is displayed by search engines and shown in the title bar of most browsers. All other pages will be unaffected and their titles will remain as "Page Name - Site name".

Make sure you edit the skin you are using. This is set by $wgDefaultSkin in your LocalSettings.php file.