5 Days of Mura Plugins: Day 4 - Google Sitemaps v2
We return to the "5 Days of Mura Plugins" with an old favorite, Google Sitemaps. This was the first plugin we developed (the first ever Mura plugin developed outside Blue River Interactive, in fact), and an update will increase its performance and add several requested features.
Google Sitemaps are XML-based files that Google (and now other search engines) use to help index a website, and the plugin will automatically generate the file based on your criteria. The new version will, as previously, allow per-page exclusion of pages, and use inheritance to make including/excluding sections very easy.
New options will include:
- let you pick the location of the file (site root or web root)
- allow you to pick a specific time/frequency for the file to be generated
- easily enable/disable sitemap generation
It will also be much more performance-oriented, as the original used the API much more heavily than was strictly necessary. The new version will instead generate the sitemap by directly accessing the database, which should allow much larger Mura sites to use the plugin.
[update: 11:40 PM 11/02/2011]
After much tinkering, the 'inheritance' of whether or not to include pages into a sitemap is complete. Essentially you can individually include or exclude any page in your sitemap, regardless of what you have set in pages above it. I haven't included Priority & and update frequency in the inheritance chain, as those should be set on a per-page basis (a page can still be set to "inherit" but have specific priority/update frequency).
[update: 3:20 PM 11/02/2011]
The beta of Meld's Google Sitemaps plugin, version 2.0, is now complete. You can download the plugin below. If you encounter any errors or issues, please report them in our community forums.
On Monday we will be finishing our "5 Days of Plugins" quest by taking a look at the existing functionality in Mura Comments and adding things like threaded comments and an in-line comment form. Tune in to see what we have in store!
» download the Google Sitemaps plugin
