Setting title using wp_title filter

Question

I want to do something very simple but I'm stuck finding where in WordPress I need to perform this.

When someone on my WordPress site visits a blog post page I want the title in the blog post to replaced the title of the page.

I think I can do this with the wp_title filter hook?

I thought about something like the following :-

add_filter('wp_title', 'filter_pagetitle');

function filter_pagetitle($title) {
 $the_post_id    = get_the_ID();
 $the_post_data  = get_post($the_post_id);
 $title = $the_post_data->post_title;

 return $title;
}

However I am a bit lost as to where I put this, I thought it would need to be in loop-single.php as I want this to apply only to single pages, but I have also seen that this needs to be in functions.php within my theme?

Any help would be appreciated :-)

Rich

Answer 1

Since wp_title() is usually called from the header.php file of your theme, then it runs on every page of your WordPress (frontend usually). So place the filter hook and function in your theme's functions.php file, and just check if it's a blog post before you change the title. Something like this:

add_filter('wp_title', 'filter_pagetitle');
function filter_pagetitle($title) {
    //check if its a blog post
    if (!is_single())
        return $title;

    //if you get here then its a blog post so change the title
    global $wp_query;
    if (isset($wp_query->post->post_title)){
        return $wp_query->post->post_title;
    }

    //if wordpress can't find the title return the default
    return $title;
}