HstResponse::addHeadElement has no effect

Question

I'm using Hippo CMS.

After unsuccessfully using HST SEO support plugin, I realised that HstResponse::addHeadElement did not have any effect on my HTML pages.

For instance, when adding the following lines in a component's code:

Element title = response.createElement("title");
title.setTextContent("Foo");
response.addHeadElement(title, "hst.seo.document.title");

I would expect the corresponding <title>Foo</title> markup to be included in the response, but it is not.

What did I miss?

Answer 1

The problem is that I didn't have an appropriate hst:headContributions node in the layout file.

I had two of them for two different categories:

<hst:headContributions xhtml="true" categoryIncludes="headerNav" />

and

<hst:headContributions xhtml="true" categoryIncludes="styles" />

But the plugin doesn't use any category for its head contributions.

Adding the following line in my JSP template fixed the issue:

<hst:headContributions xhtml="true" categoryExcludes="headerNav,styles" />