Module works perfectly! Very clean interface. Thanks for this!

Excellent module! Very well thought out and designed. Also very clean and simple to use. I had it up and running within 15 minutes and google is now showing 99 urls mapped versus the 17 it was previously! It is also nice to know that it is always notifying the search engines when I make changes. I don't have to do a thing anymore.

Thank you for sitemap! It has saved me a ton of time.

The module is a snap to install. In 10 minutes, it's up and running and outputting beautifully. I couldn't have asked for a better module.

I can't tell you ho much time you've saved me with this module.

Thanks a million.

Version 1.1 is now available and has some new little features, but more importantly it addresses a problem that version 1.0 had with stand-alone weblog entry forms.

hi,
fantastic application - just what i've been waiting for!!!
as i run a news site which is listed in google news it would be great if i could limit the entries to the last 3 days cause this it what google news wants me to do...
piniging google doesn't work for me and if i click on "View Google's index of your website" i get all pages listed in google - not just my pages...
nevertheless some fantastic job you did!
thanks' again
cheers
roman/berlin/germany www.berlinista.com

hi roman,
i had a look at your sitemap and the locations don't seem to have your website base url in them, i'm guessing that that's why pinging google doesn't work. what build of EE do you have installed?

hi,
Build: 20070622
actually i don't know how to get the url into the sitemap.
thanks'
roman

roman, the url is automatically pulled in using the $FNS->fetch_site_index() function. from your control panel go to Admin -> System Preferences -> General Configuration and check if the "URL to the root directory of your site" is set.

hi,
this works!!!
thanks' a ton. somebody built my site and obviously didn't do everything right. after receiving all the money he now refuses to help and i'm lost.
thanks' again!

no problem, glad that worked.

Hi,

Great idea for this module! I have a question regarding sitemaps urls and EE's pages module urls though. The sitemap urls being created include /pages/page_name (the template name) even though the url I am specifying is /project/page_name as seen below:

sitemap module creates:
http://www.1111camino.com/dev/index.php?/pages/the_condos

while the EE display url is:
http://www.1111camino.com/dev/index.php?/project/condos

Is this in essence looking like duplicate content to the SE's?

Any comments appreciated!
Thanks,
Mark

hi mark, the EE display url, http://www.1111camino.com/dev/index.php?/project/condos, is that url using the pages module? if it is then you could set the status of that weblog to closed and specify it as a url in the sitemap.

if you can post the url to your sitemap here, or email it to me then i could take a closer look.

Hi Ben,
Yes http://www.1111camino.com/dev/index.php?/project/condos is the URL I have assigned to that entry in the pages module. I am a bit confused when you say to close the weblog (which I have named "pages" also) and specify it as a url in the sitemap. If I close the weblog....it no longer is live and doesn't display at all in the sitemap.

http://www.1111camino.com/dev/index.php?/site/sitemap is the url to the current sitemap.

I'm new to EE and very light on coding so if my questions seems odd...that's why :)

Thanks Ben!
Mark

from the sitemap module screen you can set the status of each weblog to open or closed. selecting closed does NOT close the weblog, but simple means that it is not included in the sitemap.

if you do this, you can then press the big green "insert new location" button in the top right, and add the url's that you use with the pages module manually.

i hope thats clear enough

Hi Ben,
Excellent! Thanks for that clarification. Its working great now!

Mark

I'm puting up site in a couple of weeks and am very interested in using your Sitemap Module. My question is does it ping the search engines from a stand alone entry form?

hi chuck, yes it does ping search engines on submission of a stand alone entry form.

Hi,

I just purchased the module it worked fine in my offline copy. But when i try to view the renderd map it seems to fails.
I think i set up everything correct you can fine the sitemap here : http://www.geboortelijst.be/sitemap.php you will see it keeps loading.

But the template is correct http://www.geboortelijst.be/index.php/sitemap and gives a result. Can you give me any hints on whats going wrong i cant wait to see the results of implementing these site maps.

Kevin,

hi kevin, try removing any spaces or blank lines before the exp:sitemap tag. if that doesn't solve it then it may be a redirect problem. test it with some sample text and let me know if that helps.

Hi ben,

Nope removing the tag or placing other text in it has the same effect it seems to be loading forever.

Is there something else i can try? Would it not be easyer to just include the template?

Having troubles getting the module to work. Are there known issues if you are using an .htaccess file to remove the index.php from the EE URL?

Oh, wait...the problem was I have the site offline. The sitemap.php doesn't play nice with the System Offline template.

A different problem though is I cannot select the template I need. The templates are not showing up correctly in the template drop down on the Sitemap CP.

Anybody else experiencing double slashes ("//") in the sitemap URL s, between the domain name and the first segment? Except for my site's root and the manual locations, all of the sitemap's URLs look like

http://example.com//article/1/

A suggestion, to remove the trailing slash from my {path}, did not work (click my name).

I am running EE 1.6.0 and am using the exclude method to remove index.php from the URL.

Kevin: the template is included, it is called sitemap_template.txt

Phil: can you please elaborate a bit on what happens when you click on the template drop-down.

Quena: i have emailed you with the solution. i will be posting an update shortly that fixes this problem.

Works like a charm!

Hi,
I purchased the lic on 12/31/07 however I never got a code. Where can I download the files?

Sufian: the code was sent to you, but blocked by your spam filter. i have sent it again.

My template keeps putting in the // and I have removed the back slash from root, any ideas?

Hi Ben,

can I see a demo of your Module? I'm interessted in the layout and the ability to style via CSS.

cheers

Russ: version 1.2 contains a fix for this.

stefan: i think you may have missed the point of the module. it creates an xml sitemap (also known as a google sitemap) of your entire site. there is no layout or styling. hope this clarifies things.

Ben, I checked my spam settings and still have not seen any emails re the code. I just sent an email via another email account. Please send to that one.

Ben: I think there could be an issue with SiteMap Pinger and LG Better Meta. It seems that your tab is overriding any other tabs.

You may need to check for previous new tabs.

Cheers

hi leevi, thanks for letting me know about that, i have added the fix to the current release. cheers, ben

Hi Ben,
i purchased sitemap but have experienced an issue when trying to view the rendered sitemap template:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /../system/core/core.functions.php(637) : eval()'d code on line 1

What happened here?

Working like a charm! Thank you! But I’ve got two questions. Can I use this module for my wiki’s articles? And what exactly is “Insert new location” button? For what reason should I use it?

hi alex, i have not tried using it with the wiki module, but i assume not since the sitemap module reads entries from the weblog entries table.

the “Insert new location” button lets you insert additional urls into the sitemap. for example, if part of your site is external to EE then you could manually add the urls to it. or if you have a template that you want to include in the sitemap that doesn't have any associated weblog entries then you could add its url too.

Well… Everything was OK, but I’ve got a strange problem starting this morning. I tried to add url using site modem, but when I’m trying to access it in admin/modems panel all I’ve got is a blank page. Looks like modem itself is working, ‘cause I see its result in publish page and Goggle can access my map without problem. But I cannot configure modem any more. Using it in admin/modules leading to blank page only. I reinstalled everything using fresh downloaded files, but still can not see configuration panel of modem. Please, help.

Suddenly everything is back to normal. I believe this glitch is somehow connected to the Goggle itself. ‘Cause everything was fixed as soon as I resubmitted my sitemap in Goggle.

ok, glad you got it sorted

I have a feature request: Notifications of updated sitemap to Google, Yahoo et al only in the case of content being placed in a certain status specified by the user -- for example, "Open". For those of us who have a draft-in-progress workflow, immediate notification of so-called "updates" is premature and could result in bots trying to index content that is not ready yet. Don't they penalize when they visit and can't find the content?

Has anyone used this on MediaTemple GS?

Hi Rushing, i've been on MT GS (till last week) and it worked perfectly.
To all: after moving my webspace and updating the module to 1.2 i now get this: error on line 1 at column 47: Space required after the Public Identifier
Where exactly do i have to add space? using the standard file which came with the update.
Sorry for being too much of a noob...

Hi,

I'am having issue with the curl this works fine when i try to call any websiite outside my server. But when i try to call a link that is on the same server it does not work.

How can i fix this? I bought this module a month ago and still was not able to use it.

I hope to have an anwser fast thanks in advance,

kevin, can you please explain what the problem is? its unclear to me.

Hey Ben,

Could you take a look at this thread please.

Thanks

roman, it seems it was a memory issue with your service provider, see this thread

matt, i am working on this and will have an update for you shortly

matt: version 1.3 contains a fix for this

brendon: this is already possible with the status options (new naming convention in 1.3 for clarity)

Hi,
is there any chance that you might offer some feature which lets me add more sitemaps that get updated whenever i post a new article? I have two other sitemaps - one for google news international and one for the german google news which i'd have to update using a cron job. being able to add those to the module would be the far more elegant solution :-)
just asking...

nice, thanks!

Great tool. Looks like it will be a big help to those who use Google Webmaster Tools.

Dear Ben,
Some 'lastmod' tags seem to be rendering the following dates: 2005--1-1-
While other render fine: 2007-11-06
Google doesn't like those dates and classifies them as unknown dates/renders as an error.
Any idea what causes these lastmod tags to be rendered like this?
Thanks.

I own 1.2. How do I download the 1.3 update?

dion: i don't know why this might be happening, but i'll investigate. can you email me the link to your sitemap please.

mark: just enter your email and code into the download form on this page and you will get the latest files. upload them to your server and you're done. you can also see the update changes in the changelog.

Upgraded to 1.3 and I get this:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://www.homerobots.com/sitemap.php
Line Number 1, Column 2:

By the time you look at it I might be back to 1.2.

Never mind, sorry. We did something wrong on our end.

I'm getting this error after reinstalling my entire site (it worked fine before - great module, Google loved it, but we had a server crash and I've just rebuilt everything) - the last thing to do was install the sitemap module. I've tried a few variations of settings. Any clues?

XML Parsing Error: syntax error
Location: http://www.hotyogadoctor.com/sitemap.php
Line Number 1, Column 50:
-------------------------------------------------^

Thanks!

Robert

PS. Sitemap is at http://www.hotyogadoctor.com/sitemap.php

If I view the rendered template at:

http://www.hotyogadoctor.com/index.php/site/sitemap/

I get the sitemap!

So what is the issue - why doesn't sitemap.php render that for me? What have I done wrong!

Cheers,

Robert

OK I think I have it now - despite full propagation, I'm still showing some files at another host (temp while we fixed our crash). It appears sitemap.php is trying to go via the old dns - I have no idea why, as the domain is removed from that site and everything else is fine, hopefully it is a short term issue.

Cheers,

Robert

hi robert, it seems to be working now.

i'm currently at SXSW and just met the ellislab team and some EE member communities!

Hi Ben - that sounds exciting!

Tnx for checking, appreciated. It did take a little while, but resolved itself. It's a great app, thanks (Especially if your server goes down with no backup and you need to tell Google where to go to find all your pages again).

It was a weird propagation issue, despite a full 2 days and everything working fine, that particular url was trying to resolve at the temp host despite the fact that it (that filename) had never been hosted there.

Any gossip on EE2.0 at SXSW?

I'm having two issues with sitemap on my site.

1.) I cannot enabled the extension site pinger. I click enabled extensions but it never turns it on.

2.) The urls logged into the sitemap are not the full url's..
i.e. /blog_entry_name

when it should be
i.e. /reviews/detail/blog_entry_name

Hey Ben,

I'm still having trouble with the installation, and posted details and error messages in this thread. (I also sent you a PM with a little more info.)

Any advice would be most appreciated...

Ben,
I have been unable to get any support on your component? Can you please drop me an e-mail on how to get my extension fixed as well as how to get the sitemap.php working when .htaccess is setup to remove the index.php?

A follow up on my two issues which I have found resolutions for:

1.) If you can't enabled the sitemap pinger extensions, check to make sure your path.php and config.php are set to 666. I believe this was the source of the issue.

2.) If you are using the .htaccess method to remove index.php, you will need to do add the following to allow sitemap.php to be picked up on your site.

RewriteRule ^sitemap.php$ /index.php/site/sitemap_name/ [L]

This is a great module, however I have waited at least a week to get some help from Ben with no luck. I can understand this if this product were free, but when your charging you should have a better support system in place to help out the paying customers.

hi gregg, i apologise that this issue took a while to resolve. unfortunately it coincided with me being abroad, but also as it turned out it was not a problem with the sitemap extension.

anyway, i hope you are satisfied with the module and again sorry for the inconvenience.

I've been trying to get thi up and running but i still get the home page coming up when i hit http://www.weisslurie.com/sitemap.php the site map does show up at http://www.weisslurie.com/site/sitemap

Im using the htaccess to remove index.php and i tryied the above code
RewriteRule ^sitemap.php$ /index.php/site/sitemap_name/ [L] whicj didnt seem to work

Well after finding this code on the EE forums i got it to work

RewriteRule ^sitemap.php$ /index.php/site/sitemap/ [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]

I don't see Sitemap tab when I want to publish something?

Is the sitemap pinger extension enabled?

Sorry I didn't notice that pinger extension is not enabled.

Hi,

I want two types of sitemap, an XML one for the search and a visible one for site visitors. This may be a stupid question, but can the module create both?

Thanks.

this module creates an xml sitemap only. i would think if you wanted to create a sitemap for visitors that it would have to be styled, plus you would probably want to have more control over the content

Maybe I'm stupid, but I can't get it to work.
I get the following error:

'This page contains the following errors:
error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.'

Besides that I cannot insert a New Location?

Any help appreciated.

guus, please post the link so i can check the error message.

the New Location issue is now fixed so please download latest version

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your quick reply!

It seemed that I didn’t correctly changes the template variable in the sitemap.php
I downloaded a new version, so the New Location function is now working!

The only thing I don’t understand is where the sitemap.xml is generated?

Regards,

Guus

no problem, glad you got it working

ah, that is where the magic happens. if you look near the top of the sitemap.php file then you will see that the content type is set to xml, and the xml code is then generated by the module.

cheers,
ben

Yes, I saw that but I must have an .xml file to submit my sitemap manually to Google and Yahoo!?

Where is the sitemap.xml?

you should submit the url of your sitemap.php file, they will read it as an xml file

Aha, now I understand!

Thanks Ben

Hi,

I'm having trouble when installing the module via the Modules tab.

The error I'm getting is:
MySQL ERROR:

Error Number: 1074

Description: Too big column length for column 'url' (max = 255). Use BLOB instead

Query: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `exp_sitemap` ( `id` INT(6) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `weblog_id` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, `url` VARCHAR(300) NOT NULL, `site_id` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, `status` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, `change_frequency` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, `priority` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`));

Can you help?

it looks like your database is limited to 255 characters for a varchar field. i have added a fix to the module, please re-upload the new files and try again

Works like a charm. Thanks Ben.

Very impressed with the speed of reply too.

I also had to come back and say I think this module is great. Not just because it meets a need superbly, but also because the attention to detail of things such as the links to Google and Yahoo sitemap submission pages makes me feel you must have done a good job with the bits I'm never going to look at.

Well done.

thanks dave, i appreciate the compliment

Is there any way to make "Send sitemap ping to search engines" check box checked by default when editing an entry. I have a situation where this is desired.

hi james, this cannot be done but i will add it as an option in the next release.

in the meantime you can make it work by changing line 248 in ext.sitemap_pinger.php from:

if($IN->GBL('C', 'GET') == 'publish')

to:

if(1)

Ah ok....

I noticed a few problems in my output. Some of the dates being returned are kinda strange. I have some dates like this:
1225-42-56
1228-97-16
1233-81-00
1224-82-08
etc...

This is obviously throwing up some warnings with Google. Any ideas?

Going in and editing the post and saving it does fix the problem. But it is kinda annoying.

the latest version checks and fixes bad dates

Hi,

I've bought the module and love it. I think I’m missing something obvious though so please excuse me if the question is obvious.

Google needs the sitemap to be created at the root directory but the only module related file I can see there is the sitemap.php file (which returns an error when visited www.alchemea.com/sitemap.php), not that Google seems to accept .php files as sitemaps anyway.

I do have an xml page but this is at: http://www.alchemea.com/index.php/global/xmlsitemap. How can I get this to the root directory?

Thanks

Google will accept "www.alchemea.com/sitemap.php" as a valid sitemap feed.

Have you enabled the module and extension?

In your template /global/xmlsitemap do you only have the following: {exp:sitemap:get}

Have you modified the template variable in sitemap.php to point to that template (/global/xmlsitemap)?

Hi James,

This is clearly the day of me missing the beeding obvious. The template variable was incorrect and all now works fine.

Thank you.

Hi James,

This is clearly the day of me missing the beeding obvious. The template variable was incorrect and all now works fine.

Thank you.

Hi James,

This is clearly the day of me missing the beeding obvious. The template variable was incorrect and all now works fine.

Thank you.

Hi Ben, looking at the code I take it that slashes are supposed to be added to the end of entry title urls (for example)? For some reason this is not happening on our sitemap: http://www.cafedelabourse.com/sitemap.php
Does any setting in Expression Engine affect that?
thanks, Ben.

actually no... slashes aren't added to the end of the title urls. i really don't think it makes a difference to any web browsers or google though. or do you need it for some other reason??

Just for SEO purposes, so the urls are the same everywhere.

Hi Ben,

I just installed your sitemap module. It works great.

Do you plan on adding the ability to include wiki articles and forum entries, too?

That would be fantastic ...

BenB: if you really want a slash at the end then you can change line 122 in mod.sitemap.php to:
$location = $url.$entry['url_title']."/";

Laurent: i will definitely consider it for a future release, though right now i can't say exactly when that might be...

Hi Ben,

I am getting this error at the top of my sitemap module page in the cp:

Notice: Undefined offset: 1 in /home/green/webapps/htdocs/admin/modules/sitemap/mcp.sitemap.php on line 464

When I try to look at the sitemap ( http://www.greenmarketing.com/sitemap.php ) I get the following error:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://www.greenmarketing.com/sitemap.php
Line Number 1, Column 2:
-^

Strange think is, it was working fine, then my host's (webfaction) data center had a fire and everything closed down for a day and a half. Everything is back-up but my queries to my database are very slow. I am not sure if that has some how screwed things up.

Would be glad of some help.

Cheers,
Matt

I think it may be fixed. I have a feeling it was all due to a network issue and the problems at the data center.

By the way, this is a great module. Thank you!

Matt

cool, thats good to hear.

thanks, i enjoy working on it!

paid but where is the "code"?

sometimes takes a bit of time for the payment notification to come through but you should have it by now

Am I looking for a notification from you of paypal?

alex, the code was sent to your email. i'll resend now, but please check your spam folder in case it was accidentally put there

Works like a dream, thank you!

Ben,

Great plugin. However, I need your help to get it working properly. I have installed it fine, created a sitemap template, set the right template path in sitemap.php, and removed index.php from the file path since I use .htaccess. I use the 'exclude method' so I added sitemap.php to make sure I can access it. No dice.

I get:

"This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Extra content at the end of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error."

Any help appreciated.

hi DJ, please ensure there are no blank lines or any other text before or after the {exp:sitemap:get} tag in your template. if that doesn't help then view the source code of the rendered page and check if the xml text is appearing there.

No space before or after in the template.

There is no source code on the error page at all – not even for the error message (Safari). In Firefox all I get is a blank page.

I'm thinking this is related to my .htaccess set-up, yet I've included the sitemap.php and removed index.php from the path.

Any other suggestions?

can you show me the appropriate line in your .htaccess file please. it should look something like this:

RewriteCond $1 !^(images|system|themes|index\.php|sitemap\.php) [NC]

RewriteCond $1 !^(images|name-of-my-system-folder|themes|index\.php|img|css|js|client|favicon.ico|exclude.html|sitemap\.php) [NC]

that looks right. can you look at your sitemap template url, so for example www.my-site.com/site/sitemap, and check if it shows up correctly there. if it does, then make sure that the $template and $sitemap_url variables are correctly set in sitemap.php

if you still can't solve it then send me an email and i can help you troubleshoot further.

Fixed it, there were a couple things:

1) I was using the Pages module and had a template called sitemap in the root. I added your sitemap template to it's own template group.

2) I was missing '/' in the $sitemap_url

3) When you copy and paste paths from the forum, it uses curly quotes.

Thanks for you help, this is a kickass module.

Hi Ben,

I've just purchased the sitemap module but after playing about with it, am I right that it doesn't dynamically generate links for pages in EE's static pages module? I have 85 static pages on my site and don't want to be adding them all manually via the Insert New Location button; not to mention that I don't want to have to manually maintain the static pages within the module if any of our multiple users add, remove or edit any of the pages.

Thanks for any advice,

Ste

Hi Ben,

I've just went through the EE thread and unfortunately, it looks like the module doesn't support EE's static pages module - you said in March 2008 that it's something you'd like to work on, have you got any sort of timeline for this at all?

I also have another question - I have a weblog (news) that has a template group (news), but within this group, as well the the main group for news stories (news/index), I also have other templates for other categories of news item (news/press-releases, news-case-studies, etc).

I have figured out how to display the main news stories, but how can I also display the news/press-releases entries?

The same issue also happens in my people weblog - I have a template group named 'about,' but besides about/index, I also have about/staff, about/trustees, about/partners, about/supporters, etc, and each template displays the content in different ways but so having the entire weblog open in news/index just doesn't work right for me.

I know I can add the URL's manually, but I'm talking about hundreds of entries here.

Again, any advice would be appreciate if I'm missing something here.

Thanks,

Ste

hi ste,

the pages module is indeed the priority for the next major release, and i realise it was in march when i mentioned it but unfortunately other projects have delayed its release. so i'm afraid i can't say when it will be available, but it definitely will become a feature of the module.

regarding your news and people weblogs, because of the complex way in which weblog entries can be displayed, in your case it appears to be by specifying categories, the module can currently only be used to display one template for each weblog. this is because people use the weblogs in many ways. for example on a specific template you may only display weblog entries that are in a specific category or have a certain status. the module doesn't support all of these ways of displaying content unfortunately.

if you think that the module is not suitable for your particular site and would prefer not to use it then i would be happy to refund you. please email me if this is the case.

all the best,
ben