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Sitemap Generator

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 6:50 am
by shiznatix
So my company wants to make a sitemap for our website and I am like "ok" so thats where I am.

I was thinking about coding my own but it seams like there is a lot of work that goes into that but since my website is dynamic and things change quickly without any html files changing I thought that might make the most sense.

I also found this: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone- ... rator.html which looks alright but I obviously can't try it out without buying it so I dunno so much.

So really my question is, how do you guys handle your sitemaps, did you code your own generator or did you use some prepackaged software for that one?

Re: Sitemap Generator

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 9:02 am
by papa

Re: Sitemap Generator

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2008 1:03 pm
by josh
Google Sitemaps? SimpleXML + A database query. THere's no one size fits all solution for dynamic sites because everyone has a different navigational scheme, for instnace you wouldn't want millions of search engine results pages in your sitemap, that you would get by simply crawling your site .

Re: Sitemap Generator

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 10:02 am
by alex.barylski
Usually the CMS frameworks provide a module or some similar facility to generate sitemaps on the fly...

CMSMS
TypoLight
phpWCMS
Joomla

Just about all that I have worked with (not aware of a module in WordPress but it's not really designed for enterprise information architecture/management) provide a quick and easy way to reflect the site structure to some degree.

If you are not using a CMS...you might consider using a web site spider to crawl your site and generate links to publically accessible resources?

Re: Sitemap Generator

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 10:53 am
by The_Anomaly
jshpro2 wrote:Google Sitemaps? SimpleXML + A database query. THere's no one size fits all solution for dynamic sites because everyone has a different navigational scheme, for instnace you wouldn't want millions of search engine results pages in your sitemap, that you would get by simply crawling your site .
Yeah, this is basically what I do. I have a video sharing site, so every time a video is uploaded it, it runs a loop through the database, and creates the XML file based on that information. It was actually pretty fun to do.

My understanding is that you use sitemaps for pages that aren't static. As in, the videos are identified with an ID in the URL, so unless the spider identifies and goes through a bunch of numbers in the URL, it won't find the proper videos. So, the sitemap is created and is where the spider can find all of the videos it wants to index.