Generate Twitter Card Meta Tags using Metatag in Drupal

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When someone tweets a link from your website, Twitter can use Twitter Cards to attach rich photos, videos and media to Tweets.

By doing some minimal configuration changes on your Drupal site using the Metatag Module and the Twitter Cards submodule, users can see a “Card” added below the tweet that contains neatly formatted information coming from your website, as shown in Image 1 below.

The cards are generated using HTML markup in the HEAD region of your Drupal site; that’s why the Metatag module is used.

Twitter will scrape your site and generate the card using the HTML meta tags.

Twitter Cards

There are four variations of Twitter cards. They are:

1. Summary Card – Displays Title, description, and thumbnail
2. Summary Card with Large Image – As the name suggests, similar to Summary Card but with a larger image
3. App Card – A Card with a direct download to a mobile app. Use this Card to drive app downloads
4. Player Card – Displays video/audio/media.

Image 1 above shows a “Card” of type Summary with Large Image.

In this tutorial, we will look at the steps involved in setting up the “Summary Card with Large Image” Twitter Card.

Getting Started

The Metatag module has a dependency on the Token module. However, if you download and enable the Drupal module using Composer and Drush, the dependency is automatically taken care of as we will show you now.

Use composer to download the module:

composer require drupal/metatag

Once the Metatag module is downloaded using composer, the Token module, which is a dependency, will be downloaded automatically.

Then enable the “Metatag: Twitter Card” submodule:

drush en metatag_twitter_cards -y

The above Drush command will automatically enable the Metatag: Twitter Card submodule, Metatag module and Token module.

Finally, it is always a good idea to clear the cache after enabling Drupal modules:

drush cr

Configure Twitter Cards

By default, Twitter Cards can be added to any content type. We will now configure the Twitter Cards for the Article Content type.

1. Go to Configuration > Metatag (admin/config/search/metatag) and click on “Add default meta tags”.

2. On the next page, select “Article” (or whatever content type you want to configure) from the Type dropdown.

3. Then click on Save. This is required for the correct tokens to appear in the “Browse available tokens” window.

4. Edit the “Content: Article” configuration from the Metatag page.

5. Click on “Twitter cards” to expand the field set and then select “Summary Card with large image” from the Twitter card type dropdown.

6. Now, we have to add tokens into the correct fields. Click “Browse available tokens.” then click on Nodes.

NOTE: If you can’t see “Nodes”, this means you need to save the “default meta tag” option first then edit it again.

Fill in the following fields:

• Description: [node:summary]
• Site’s Twitter account: Add your twitter account, i.e., @webwashnet
• Title: [node:title]
• Page URL: [node:url]
• Image URL: [node:field_image] (adjust the field name accordingly)
• Image alternative text: [node:field_image:alt] (adjust the field name accordingly)

Find Image Field Token

For this type of Twitter card, an image field must exist in your content type. We will show you how to use Token to grab that image data. Click on “Browse available tokens”.

Then drill down by going to Nodes -> Image. This assumes you’re using the Image (field_image) field on the Article content type.

The token should be [node:field_image].

Once you have found the image entity URL, make sure your mouse focus is in the empty Image URL Twitter Card meta tag field, and then click on the image entity URL token value. This will copy/paste the token value into the Image URL field.

Find Image Field Token on Media Asset

If you’re using a media field instead of an image field for handling assets, then use the following token, [node:field_media:entity:thumbnail] (change the field_media name accordingly).

7. Configure any extra fields as needed, then scroll down and click on Save.

8. Once you have filled out the other Twitter Card fields with their respective token values, you should validate the end result markup using the Twitter Card Validator tool. We will now show you how to validate your Twitter card.

As you can see, Twitter successfully recognised our “Summary with large image” card and displayed the information correctly.

NOTE: You’ll need to make sure your website is publicly accessible for the validator tool to work.

View HTML Source

If you want to see the generated markup, view the HTML source on your Drupal site and look for the “twitter:*” meta tags.

Summary

Twitter can display a neatly formatted version of your website’s content whenever someone’s tweets a link to your content. There are various types of Twitter cards depending on your needs.

We have shown how you can use the Metatag module and Twitter Cards submodule to configure Drupal 8 to correctly send your website’s content to Twitter and how to validate your markup to ensure Twitter correctly parses your website content.

FAQ

Q: I changed the default meta tag configuration, but the tags are not changing?

Try clearing the site cache. Go to Configuration > Performance and click on “Clear all caches”.