Discussion Forum

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Sitemap File

I read in the developer help that there is supposed to be a sitemap.xml file being generated in the ~/sites folder. I don't seem to have a sitemaps file as explained, but it would be very nice for our Google Custom Search engine. Is this functionality no longer part of the latest version of BigTree, or am I looking in the wrong location?

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Sitemap File

It's a dynamically generated URL, so if you go to http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml it will auto-draw an XML sitemap from your Pages navigation. It doesn't include any hidden pages, so it's not the most useful sitemap for Google Custom Search.

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Re: Sitemap File

Thanks, there it is. I know you use Google Custom Search pretty exclusively with BigTree CMS. Is there another method of ensuring that Google has the best index of the pages within the site, or do you just trust that their automatic crawl does a good enough job without a sitemp?

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Sitemap File

We usually trust the automatic crawl to do its job. Sometimes clients ask for full sitemaps which we can manually create using the getHiddenNavByParent + getNavByParent methods of the BigTreeCMS class to pull both types of pages, but its pretty rare and in my experience not necessary.

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Re: Sitemap File

Thanks Tim. This is my first experience with Google Custom Search, so I was unsure how reliable its results are. I figured it would be pretty easy to customize the sitemap generation to include the hidden files. Oddly enough, I am seeing my search page, which is hidden, in my sitemap file:

<url>
<loc>http://bigtree.____.edu/about/locations/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://bigtree.____.edu/search/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://bigtree.____.edu/about/our-history/</loc>
</url>

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Sitemap File

Looks like I must have forgotten how this works! I just checked the BigTreeCMS::drawXMLSitemap call and it looks like it does include hidden pages -- just excludes archived pages and pages that have a publish date in the future.

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Re: Sitemap File

Haha, no problem. I submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools and our custom search dashboard, and Google seems to be happy with its formatting.