Shack Open Graph Documentation

Fixing "The following required properties are missing: og:description"

Our Shack Open Graph extension helps your site visitors to smoothly and effectively share your Joomla content items on Facebook. To make the most of this plugin, we suggest you test your content items in Facebook's Sharing Debugger. This tool displays the information that is used when visitors of your Joomla website share a particular content item from your site on Facebook.

Accessing Facebook's Sharing Debugger is as easy as clicking the "Open Facebook Debugger" button on the Advanced tab of your Shack Open Graph plugin settings:

click open facebook debugger

When you start testing a Joomla content item in the Sharing Debugger, you may find that it displays the "The following required properties are missing: og:description":

missing og description property

This error is not mission-critical for your site. It just means that the Facebook post shared with your Joomla content item will display the item's text as opposed to its meta description:

text instead of meta description

And here is the same content item shared with the meta description:

meta description present

 

Create a meta description for a content item to fill in the og:description tag. This will give you an opportunity to have more shares of your content item on Facebook.

Here is how to fix the missing og:description error:

  1. Create a Facebook Application for your site 
  2. Fill in the Meta Description box of the content item.

Step #1. Create a Facebook Application for your site

  • Read this document on how to create a Facebook Application for your site.
  • Copy your Facebook Application ID number as instructed in that tutorial.

Excellent! You are ready to move on to the next step.

Step #2. Fill in the Meta Description box of the content item

  • In your Joomla administrator panel, open the content item for editing. For my demonstration, I will be testing the Home page of my Joomla site. This means, that I need to fill in the Meta Description box of the Home menu item:

the description box filled in

  • Click "Save" or "Save & Close".
  • Now get back to the Facebook Sharing Debugger.
  • Click the Scrape Again button once or twice:

click scrape again

  • You should see that "The following required properties are missing: og:description" error disappeared:

the error fixed