I’ve been working on a client’s new Zen Cart shop. I originally wanted to use Magento, but certain complications needed something that was lightweight on the server. Since I had already built all the products in a test install of Magento, I installed and used a product importer in Zen Cart.
After using this importer, all of my products had blank meta titles. Apparently, when you have blank meta titles, the URL shows up instead as the tab name or window name. Of course, this isn’t good at all.
There are settings on each product’s Edit Meta Information page that let you choose whether the meta title will include the Product’s Name, Title, Model (SKU), Price, or Tagline.
However, all of my products had these settings at “No”. How could I set all of the products to use the Product Name or Title as its Meta Title using a sitewide change, instead of doing them individually?
Online searches weren’t any help because all they said was, “Zen Cart uses Product Names automatically as the meta titles.” Yes, of course, but what if you had overwritten that functionality?
To reset all of your products to use the Product Name as its meta title with one sitewide change, you need to open PHPMyAdmin. Log into the Zen Cart database and use a SQL query:
UPDATE products SET `metatags_products_name_status` = 1 WHERE `metatags_products_name_status` = 0
When doing the import, I had set the metatags_products_name_status as 0 for all products, thus disabling the meta title generation (my test row must have had that column at 0). Using this simple SQL Query restored meta titles to all products in Zen Cart.
