Support

June 10, 2019 at 12:28 pm

Brief background: My day job is as an independent consultant on Structured Data, Schema.org, etc. and the Semantic Web, Linked Data arena it has emerged from, into SEO. Google is one of my clients and I work on the Schema.org vocabulary and site with/for them.

I also run a small event site for a seasonal children’s event (visiting a Santa’s Christmas Grotto experience). Obviously I use the experience of my primary career in implementing the event site – It has been publishing Schema.org for the last 3-4 years.

Starting to get this year’s site ready for Christmas bookings I find myself with a conflict between the JSON-LD Schema.org code I have, and want to continue to, output and the default code produced by EE4.

The current outputs from our test page are captured in the first two parts of this gist: https://gist.github.com/RichardWallis/9b6885c592b3c67464d761fc3b2968a2

When comparing them you can see that things such as ticket name, ticket description, link to seller, etc. are missing from the current EE4 output plus links to the offering/organizing organization, additional Event types, and expansion of tags in the event description text.

I looked at enhancing the code of json_linked_data_for_event.template.php but found that the set of variables passed into it are very restricted and not easily enhanced. I then looked at disabling that output in favour of my own. Could be done I suppose but it seems a little wasteful, and potentially could fall foul of future upgrades.

I also include a copy of my current code in the gist, which as you will see is a bit more interactive with the core EE code. Although it does hardcode some things such as the Organization name, location, etc., which ideally should be pulled from the EE config.

I would suggest that an improvement in the quality, breadth and flexibility of the Schema.org structured data output would be welcomed by all EE users, and their SEO ambitions. Especially at this time in the dramatic growth in Schema.org implementations and SEO associated benefits.

This brings me to suggest that there is an opportunity for mutually beneficial cooperation. In return for a bit of support in the best way to improve what is currently output, maybe in replacing the current code with something more like the approach I took to the problem, I would be prepared to allocate some of my Schema.org consultancy service time, at no cost, to help move things forward to deliver, and validate, a more capable flexible Schema.org feature in EE.

Any thoughts from anyone?

Richard Wallis