Can't share individual pages to Facebook using CMS (no access to head for Open Graph)

ewashington Mar 09, 2012 02:26PM EST

I manage a news website in which we post articles and need to have the ability for our users to share individual articles/pages to Facebook. The website is hosted using CMS so I do not have access to the head code nor meta tags for Facebook's Open Graph technology. When I try to share an article to Facebook, it shares the entire website's meta description and a random image from the page, instead of the individual article/page title and description. Usually the link does not work either.

Another company that uses the same host and CMS as us has gotten this to work. I've copied their AddThis code to my site and customized it, but it still does not work. The rollover does not work for me either.

Here is their code in a script tag:

var addthis_pub="greatlakespublishing";
var addthis_brand = "Cleveland Magazine";
var addthis_header_color = "#ffffff";
var addthis_header_background = "#ce1a30;";

And a link tag:

a onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[url]', '[title]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()"
href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20"

Here is what's inside my script tag:

var addthis_pub="indianewengland";
var addthis_brand = "INDIA New England";
var addthis_header_color = "#ffffff";
var addthis_header_background = "#009;";

And my link tag:
a onmouseover="return addthis_open(this,' ','[url]','[title]')"
onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()"
href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=20"

3 Community Answers

Paul Mar 12, 2012 02:29PM EDT

Unfortunately you have to use Open Graph. You might be able to hack something together using Facebook's URL debugger to see where it's pulling information from: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

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Paul (AddThis Happiness Specialist) Best Answer Mar 12, 2012 02:29PM EDT
Unfortunately you have to use Open Graph. You might be able to hack something together using Facebook's URL debugger to see where it's pulling information from: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
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ewashington Mar 12, 2012 05:18PM EDT
How can that be true if the other site is not using Open Graph, and their shares to Facebook work fine? I tried to use the linter, and even looked at what Facebook's scraper sees. For my site it only sees the site Title and Description, not for the page. For the site that works, Facebook sees the correct page Title and Description. When you view source for my page though, the correct Title and Description are there. Why is Facebook's scraper seeing the general meta data of my site/homepage and not the meta data of the individual page?

Here is an example of a page on my site:
http://www.indianewengland.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=CE6C4271B6BC4E0D802234C9A2BF367B

Here is an example on their site which works:
http://clevelandmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=E73ABD6180B44874871A91F6BA5C249C&nm=Article+Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=1578600D80804596A222593669321019&tier=4&id=8ED7156A534A4416948D4D29CDC44EEF
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ewashington Mar 12, 2012 05:20PM EDT
Sorry, those URLs were cut off:

My page:
http://bit.ly/AerbXo

Their page (that works):
http://bit.ly/yUlKfU

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