Sitecore SiteMap Part 2

In sitecore sitemap part 1 blog post I discussed what sitecore sitemap module should have to be complete and to cover all your needs from sitemap perspective, And in this blog post I will explain the advanced SiteMap module I built and discuss the different functionalities provided in it.

The sitecore advanced SiteMap contains the following features:

·         Support multi site.

·         Support multilingual.

·         Support the all sitemap tags including optional tags.

·         Support HTML sitemap component.

·         Support allow/disallow specific items appearance within xml sitemap or html component.

·         Support submitting sitemap into common search engines.

·         Support automatic and manual xml sitemap generation.

In this part I will explain the sitecore part of the advanced SiteMap module and in the third part I will explain and provide you with the required code.

The Advanced SiteMap module mainly provide you with XML SiteMap and HTML SiteMap features, and this is dynamically configurable using sitecore configuration item.

Configuration Item:

The following screen shot show you the configuration item for our module which you can find with the path /sitecore/system/Modules/Advanced Sitemap

 

The above screen shot show you the Advanced SiteMap module configuration item which have the following fields:

·         Target Database Name : Which represents the database name that Sitecore Advanced SiteMap module will use.

·         Enable Refresh XML On Publish: Which represents allow/disallow regenerate ( refresh ) the xml sitemap file when publish item event end.

·         Multilingual SiteMap XML: Which represents whether to include all urls languages in the xml SiteMap file or not.

·         Enable Send XML Search Engines: Which enable/disable automatic sending of the generate d xml SiteMap file to the already defined search engines.

Search Engines:

From the above configuration you may notice that Sitecore Advanced SiteMap allow you to define search engines items to send the xml SiteMap file to when generated, This can be done on the path /sitecore/system/Modules/Advanced Sitemap/Search Engines as you can see in the following screenshot:

 

From the above screenshot you can see that the following are the settings needed to define aTargeted Advanced  SiteMap search engine:

·         Search Engine Request URL

·         Enabled : You can define a search engine and you also can enable/disable this item when needed.

Multisite:

As Sitecore Advanced SiteMap module support multisite so the module allow you to define the sites that you need on the path /sitecore/system/Modules/Advanced Sitemap/SiteMap Sites

The following are screen shots for the sitemap sites configuration:

 

 

From the above screenshot you can see the following setting fields to define a site item:

·         Site Name : Which is the site name used in the web configuration file in the sites section.

·         SiteMap XML Filename: Which is the name of the generated XML SiteMap file.

·         Server URL: Which is the url that will be concatenated with the items urls in the xml file.

·         Add To Robot File : This will enable/disable adding the generated xml file name to the robots.txt file in which the search engines can know where the sitemap is placed.

Show/Hide Items:

In the following screenshot you can see the SiteMap setting in the items level:

From the above screenshot you can see the following fields in SiteMap section:

·         Show In XML SiteMap: Show/Hide item from the xml sitemap.

·         Frequency Changes: You can set how frequency this item changed.

·         Priority: You can set the priority of this item among other items in your site.

·         Show In HTML SiteMap : Show/Hide this item from html sitemap.

·         HTML SiteMap Title: Set the title that will be used in the HTML SiteMap else the name will be used.

HTML SiteMap:

Sitecore Advanced SiteMap module contains a subayout called "HTMLSiteMap" that can add to any page and place this page under the root item of your site and the HTML SiteMap will be drawn .

The following screenshot show you the mentioned above Sublayout.

 

Automatic/Manual XML SiteMap Generation:

Advanced SiteMap module allow automatic and manual XML SiteMap file generation:

·         Automatic generation can be done on the publish event and you can enable/disable this on the module configuration item as mentioned above.

·         Manual Generation: This can be done using the ribbon menu item "Advanced SiteMap" then click "Generate SiteMap" if didn't fine the button click the "Customize" button and from the show menu expand the Advanced SiteMap and add "Generate SiteMap" button.

See the following screenshot:

In the following blog post I will provide a cod snippet for the above features from the Sitecore Advanced SiteMap module.