I use the 'short', or "subheader" field of tt_news as the content of the meta description tag for all of my tt_news articles.

When I first set this up, I was having problems with messy html appearing at the top of some pages. This was a result of some of my articles having some HTML in the short field that wasn't being stripped out.

I found that putting the content of the short through the stripHtml function easily remedies this problem.

Here is the code that I use to strip the HTML from the 'short' field of my tt_news records before using it as the content of the meta description tag.

## meta description

temp.newsDescription = COA

temp.newsDescription {

10 = RECORDS

10 {

  source = {GPvar:tx_ttnews|tt_news}

  source.insertData = 1

  tables = tt_news

  conf.tt_news >

  conf.tt_news = TEXT

  conf.tt_news.field = short

  conf.tt_news.stdWrap.stripHtml=1

}

}

temp.newsDescription.wrap = <meta name="description" content="|" />

page.headerData.40 < temp.newsDescription