Has anyone tried to prepare the templates for microdata? As described on: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750#product_page and on http://schema.org/docs/gs.html
It seems a good way to improve the website presentation in most search engines.
This is interesting. I might have been ignorant of this until now but I clearly see that this is a way to XML-ize your content for whatever artificial intelligence comes next. Clearly I see search algorithms to be a part of it. Check this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
What I write may be off-topic though. In QC this microdata is quite advanced business, if you want it you should ask me or some other professional to help you out commercially.
It turned out to be easy to implement this. Step 1: You will need a Google+ account, > about > contrutor to > add your website
Step 2: Anywhere in your container.tpl add <a rel="author" href="https://profiles.google.com/add your google profile number here">+</a>
The author link seems to be obligatory , i could not get it to work without the author link to a Google profile. Make the profile private if it bothers you or hide the link.
Step3: Open products_default.tpl
Find <!-- BEGIN CONTAINER --> Add after that: <div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Product">
Find <!-- END CONTAINER --> Add before that : </div>
Find $aData[sName] Replace with : <span itemprop="name">$aData[sName]</span>
Find $aData[sPages] Replace with : <span itemprop="category" content="Write your products category here till we find a dynamic way to do so">$aData[sPages]</span>
Find : $sAvailable Replace with : <span itemprop="availability" content="in_stock">$sAvailable</span>
Find : $aData[sPrice] Replace with : <span itemprop="price">$aData[sPrice]</span>
You could do the same with your products comments or a product rating system. Another option can be the old price and new price if you have those set in your admin.
I tested my shop with these mods on http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets and all seems to work fine.
If you are using the comments form then find in the comments form (also in products_default.tpl) <!-- BEGIN COMMENTS_FORM --> and paste after that : <div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review">
Find : <!-- END COMMENTS_FOOT --> and paste before that : </div>
Find : <h6>$aData[sName]</h6> Replace with : <h6><span itemprop="reviewer">$aData[sName]</span></h6>
Find : $aData[sDate] Replace with : <time itemprop="dtreviewed" datetime="$aData[sDate]">$aData[sDate]</time>
Find : $aData[sContent] Replace with : <span itemprop="description">$aData[sContent]</span>
kacey - interesting very. problem is that this is HTML 5 and HTML 5 is not implemented well in some browsers. We need to wait to change xhtml 1.1 to html 5. This changes you write will not validate in xhtml 1.1 :/
And please ... dont put code from EXT version here.
Here follows the code for the ratings plugin from http://opensolution.org/download,en,18.html?sFile=Quick.Cart/plugins/productsVotes_v0.1.zip
With the following code example code the star rating will get displayed beside the search results in Google Yahoo and Microsoft Bing. Since the microdata format is a collaboration between those three companies and completely complies with W3 standards there should be no problem with any of the major browsers in use or mobile applications. After all, the divs and spans are standards.
Microdata are used to provide more details about a website. It is the modern equivalent of the meta head tags.
Using microdata in templates will drastically imporove your search engine visibility and therefore your amount of visitors. Check what the Google employees say about it. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Instructions: Change the code for products_default.tpl to :
Treewood: this is what I found about the XHTML validation of rich snippets on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3659778/can-i-add-microdata-from-html5-to-a-xhtml-strict-site-and-still-be-compliant< br /> In my opinion it is much better to add the microdata to the templates and sacrifice on the XHTML validation , because although as you mentioned it indeed does not validate, the improvement in search engine visibility is imho far more important. Anyway, people can decide for themselves about that by changing the doctype.
Yes, if you wanted to use itemscope in XHTML, you would need to write itemscope="itemscope" and use XHTML5 (same DOCTYPE as HTML5, but XML syntax).
itemscope is not included in W3 HTML5, but present in WHATWG's version, so validation may continue to be a difficulty. There seems to be quite some political argument on this issue, which I haven't been following as it looks fairly tedious.
For the moment, if you want to use breadcrumb annotations in a finalised, validatable document format, you could use RDFa instead: the alternative (but older) proposal, which the argument is all about, and use the existing doctype
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd">
