I promised some updates to the Theme support yesterday, and I'm happy to announce that the first of the changes has now been released.
We're trying to simplify the process of writing and modifying themes as well as adding better support into the language.
One of the most obvious problems has been that there has been no automatic way of generating header content based on the page being displayed.
You may have noticed in the Fresh Theme that we had a whole pile of code to generate meta keyword statements based upon the tags used for a product. This made the theme look a little bit messy, so we've introduced a new variable - "header".
If you add
{{ header.author }}
{{ header.copyright }}
{{ header.description }}
{{ header.keywords }}
in the <head> section of your theme.liquid, then you will get automatically generated meta statements for each of the 4 types.
The author and copyright tags automatically generate statements that include a copyright statement for your store to cover its content.
The description tag generates structured information which depends upon the type of page being displayed.
We've followed Google's recommendations regarding this tag, which you can read at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264Using structured tags within the description field will provide search engines with more relevant information about your site's pages.
Finally, we automatically generate a keywords meta tag using the tags for your products. This does not help you in improving your search engine rankings, but it may assist users to find the correct information.
These tags have been added to all the stores, so everyone will start benefiting from the improved information that will be picked up by the search engines.
Brian
