I do something similar. I have a the following fields in my generic properties doctype: Page Title and Remove Sitename from Page Title. My home page then has a field name sitename. Basically it uses either Page Title (if it exists) otherwise it uses Node Name. If the Remove Sitename from Page Title is not checked, then it will add the sitename afterwards. Otherwise, it will just display the page title.

Hope this makes sense.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY nbsp "&#x00A0;">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet
 version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library"
exclude-result-prefixes="msxml 
umbraco.library">

  <xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

  <xsl:param name="currentPage"/>

  <xsl:variable name="minLevel" select="1"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="$currentPage/data [@alias='pageTitle'] != ''">
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/data [@alias='pageTitle']" />
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/@nodeName"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
    <xsl:if test="$currentPage/data [@alias='removeSitename'] != 1">
      <xsl:text> - </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/ancestor-or-self::node [@level=1]/data [@alias='siteName']"/>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet> 

Thanks for the reply Chad the problem I have is with the pages that do not have the extra property field "seopagetitle" or ones that "seopagetitle" has recently been added to their doctype but the page has not been republished since (hence in the database they still don't have a property called seopagetitle).

Because these pages don't have seopagetitle equally nothing (they just dont have seopagetitle full stop) they do not instead use the Umbraco page title.

Therefore I need a way to check if the pages have "seopagetitle" equally nothing OR they do not have the property "seopagetitle" what so ever.

If your page might not have the property you're checking against you just need to handle that. The easy way is to use the string() function, which will return an empty string if the property has no value or if the property doesn't even exist. The ultimate error handler :)

I'd use the following in xslt...

 <xsl:variable name="title">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="string($currentPage/data [@alias='seopagetitle']) != ''">
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/data [@alias='seopagetitle']" />
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/@nodeName"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:value-of select="$title" />

But if this is all the macro is doing you could just as easily handle it with the "Insert umbraco page field" button in the template editor's toolbar. You would simply select the following parameters:

Choose field = seopagetitle

Alternative field = @pageName

This will create the following line in your template:

<umbraco:Item field="seopagetitle" useIfEmpty="pageName" runat="server"></umbraco:Item>

Hope this helps.

cheers,
doug.

@Douglas

I wanted to use the umbraco Item's useIfEmpty property before for the page title, but found out it doesn't really work... I'm not able to explain more about the problem I had, because I forgot. But I think the problem was, that if the pageTitle property was empty (''), it still uses the pageTitle property instead of the pageName...

Hi,

Sorry for not responding sooner on this, been busy with Christmas etc, I managed to get it to work with Chad's suggestion but I changed <xsl:else> to <xsl:otherwise> as shown below, thank you all for your help on this problem and happy new year to you all.

<xsl:with-param name="parent" select="$currentPage/ancestor-or-self::node [@level=1]"/>  
<xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$currentPage/data [@alias='seopagetitle'] != ''"> 
           <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/data [@alias = 'seopagetitle']"/>
        </xsl:when> 
       
<xsl:otherwise>
               <xsl:value-of select="$currentPage/@nodeName"/>  
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

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