I had a grails 1.1 app working where keyword and description meta tags were dynamically generated. There was a change in how that works in 1.2, but I cannot found good documentation. I've tried numerous ways to make it work. No matter what I do the resultant html gets something like
<meta name="keywords"/>" />
instead of the actual keywords. The extra tags there are not a typo on my part. So it also creates a bug in my rendered html.
I have had problems in 1.2 with meta tags dynamically generates and found that the problems happened when the quote was followed by a $. If I put a space between the quote and the $ it worked like
<meta name="keywords" value=" ${keywords}"/>
May or may not be your problem...
In Grails 1.2, there's a performance optimized integration to Sitemesh. You can use the old implementation if you specify grails.views.gsp.sitemesh.preprocess = false in Config.groovy.
There are several issues in Grails JIRA related to meta tags :
Some of them will be fixed in Grails 1.2.1 .