So in the end, I had to go a bit sideways. I ran into some new problems about 2m ago, with an update to likely the FB algorithm. I am fully authenticated with them, and it should all work, but it wasn’t. Again.
I have the fixes from before for order running, but I was also using WP to Buffer as a plugin to manage scheduling of my posts so they aren’t all clumped together at night. But here was the weird part:
a. Direct from WP to FB but done manually would show things properly (FI and excerpt, standardized at 150×150);
b. Direct from WP to FB but done automatically was inconsistent;
c. Indirect from WP through Buffer to FB was showing a JS error of some sort and even the Buffer support couldn’t figure out what was off on my site.
No reason for one way to work and not the other, but it wasn’t showing the OG stuff properly through another channel, only if I went direct.
Eventually, I installed OG – Better Share on Social Media which does as little as possible, there aren’t even any config options. It basically throws some OG tags in, and lets you style it from there with other tools. Works perfectly, and doesn’t seem to add any overhead.
I’d rather not have another plugin running on my site, but I could remove some others that were causing bloat, and this one solves the problem completely while the others were only partial solutions. It seems friendly with SEO plugins, if you turn off the insertion of the tags in those plugins and just let your SEO plugin do the rest of its repertoire.
Paul