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Google sitemaps?
blizeH
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Just wondering if there's any easy way to develop a Google sitemap of a Vanilla forum please? ;o
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Took a peek at the sitemaps.xml spec. It should be posted at the lowest directory the user has access to, which might be a bit problematic.
We could just post it at the level Vanilla is installed in, but that leaves the rest of the site's pages out of the map. I suppose you would need some other tool to map that section.
Does anybody know if we can return this file dynamically, (e.g. http://vanilla.com/extension.php?sitemap.xml) or if it must be a static file?
Don't want to mess with mod_rewrite if I don't have to, because of potential problems with it and an existing file, friendly URLs and such.
I will test first with a dynamic file and see if google likes it.
It would be good to see something similar as an addon for Vanilla.
Maybe I will get to it this weekend... or tomorrow night if I can't sleep.
Or maybe I should just ignore the community and spend the time I usually spend here on it!
Anyways... I figure I would need a SQL query to get a list of the public discussion IDs, number of comments in each discussion, last active time, and the discussion topic.
Combine that with a loop that puts that information inside the sitemaps XML schema, and it would be golden. Of course, add some lines for the categories tab, and maybe another query and loop for user accounts.
Another item is the priority field in the sitemaps. The wordpress extension puts a higher priority on the blog posts with the most comments, I believe that is probably best, but also make stickies higher, while closed discussions and sink discussions should have the lowest priority.
Would be great if you could start on any of that... either post the code publically or we can whisper it back and forth. Do you have a vanila install with friendly URLs installed? If not, I have one that we can use for testing, but its not live yet.
<?php /* Extension Name: Sitemaps Extension Url: http://lussumo.com/docs/ Description: Generates an sitemaps.xml file of all discussion and account URLs on the forum Version: 0.0 Author: WallPhone Author Url: http://wallphone.com/ */ if ( ($Context->SelfUrl == 'extension.php') && ($PostBackAction == 'sitemap.xml') ) { // echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">'; // Get the discussions list // Loc should probably be built by the URL builder--does it work automatically for friendly URLs? // Lastmod is set to last comment time stanp // Changefreq? its optional, probably leave it out for old discussions, and figure average update or something out for current discussions. // Comment count plus comments per page should be used to determine if the discussion spans more than one page. // Example schema: // <url> // <loc></loc> // <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> // <changefreq>hourly</changefreq> // <priority>0.8</priority> // </url> // Get the user accounts // Close the sitemap echo '</urlset>'; } ?>the code to look at is this one
function ReturnSitemapData($Properties) { return '<url> <loc>'.$Properties["Link"].'</loc> <lastmod>'.$Properties["Updated"].'</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>0.5</priority> </url> '; } function FixDateForSitemap($Date = '') { $DateFormat = 'r'; if ($Date == '') { return date($DateFormat, mktime()); } else { return date($DateFormat, UnixTimestamp($Date)); } } $Sitemap = ""; $Properties = array(); while ($DataSet = $DiscussionGrid->Context->Database->GetRow($DiscussionGrid->DiscussionData)) { $Properties["Link"] = GetUrl($DiscussionGrid->Context->Configuration, "comments.php", "", "DiscussionID", ForceInt($DataSet["DiscussionID"], 0)); $Properties["Updated"] = FixDateForSitemap(@$DataSet["DateLastActive"]); $Sitemap .= ReturnSitemapData($Properties); } // Set the content type to xml echo('<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">'); // Dump the Sitemap echo($Sitemap); echo('</urlset>');we'll worry about priority later on. once this code works then we will do the rest.
I haven't tried this code so Wallphone give it a shot.
For priority the top 5 should be 1.0
next 5 = 0.75
next 5 = 0.5
next 5 = 0.25
next 5 = 0.0
u only need to do the first page so only 25-30 discussions will go in the sitemap. rest will be taken care by frequency, to make sure that no discussion is missed. and it doesn't fall off the front page in between google crawls.
also have to get the date in the correct format