Function for a Dynamic Title for WordPress Blogs

Are you a WordPress theme developer and you’re running into some frustration with getting the <h1> Title of a page to show properly on archives, categories, search results, and single posts?

I’m an experienced custom WordPress theme developer and this is a little PHP function I put together that handles putting together a page title.

// Dynamic Title
if(!function_exists('wpftw_title')) {
    function wpftw_title() {
        if (is_home()) {
            if (get_option('page_for_posts', true)) {
                // Static page home
                $title = get_the_title(get_option('page_for_posts', true));
            } else {
                // Blog posts home
                $title = __('Latest posts', 'wpftw');
            }
        } elseif (is_category()) {
            // Category archive
            $title = single_cat_title('', false);
        } elseif (is_archive()) {
            // Other archives
            $title = post_type_archive_title();
        } elseif (is_search()) {
            // Search results
            if (trim(get_search_query()) === '') {
                $title = __('No search query entered', 'wpftw');
            } else {
                $title = sprintf(__('Search results for &ldquo;%s&rdquo;', 'wpftw'), '<mark>' . trim(get_search_query()) . '</mark>');
            }
        } elseif (is_404()) {
            // 404
            $title = __('Page not found', 'wpftw');
        } elseif (is_singular()) {
            // Single post
            $title = single_post_title('', false);
        } else {
            // Anything else
            $title = get_the_title();
        }
        // Expose my own hook just in case
        return apply_filters('wpftw_title', $title);
    }
}

To use this in your theme, wherever you have an <h1> title (for example in the theme’s index.php), echo this function like this…

<h1><?php echo wpftw_title(); ?></h1>

Nathan Kinkead

Blogger, expert WordPress developer, and developer of the awesome bbPress Voting plugin which is a must-have plugin for any bbPress forum.

Download bbPress Voting for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.