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Brandon Bohling

Got ExpressionEngine? Need a sitemap index?

If you have been developing web sites for a while you already undoubtedly know the importance of sitemaps. Most blog software, such as Wordpress, provide plugins to auto generate sitemaps, but I could not find one for ExpressionEngine so I am here to explain how to auto generate your own with ExpressionEngine.

To create a simple sitemap for a SINGLE blog in ExpressionEngine you can follow the instructions explained here. However, our site has multiple blogs so I needed to use a sitemap index, which required a bit more effort. First, I will summarize the steps.

  1. Create a sitemap for each blog.
  2. Create a sitemap-[blog-name].php (like sitemap-word.php) file for each blog in web root
  3. Create a sitemap.php file
  4. Update your .htaccess file if necessary
  5. Validate with Google webmaster tools

Step 1: Create a sitemap template for each blog

In this step you need to create a template page for each blog. This page generates a sitemap for a particular blog. The code I use is below. Note: You will need to change the two variables to meet your requirements. In addition, you need to change the loc tag to match the URL to your blog.

{assign_variable:master_weblog_name="the_word"}{assign_variable:template_group_name="word"}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
	xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
	http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
	xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> 
	<url> 
		<loc>http://ebohling.com/word/</loc> 
		<lastmod>{exp:stats}{last_entry_date format="%Y-%m-T;%H:%i:%s%Q"}{/exp:stats}</lastmod> 
		<changefreq>always</changefreq> 
		<priority>1.0</priority> 
	</url> 
	 {exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}" limit="30" 
		disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks" rdf="off" dynamic="off" status="Open"} 
	 <url> 
		<loc>{title_permalink="{template_group_name}"}</loc> 
		<lastmod>{gmt_edit_date format='%Y-%m-T;%H:%i:%s%Q'}</lastmod> 
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq> 
		<priority>0.8</priority> 
	 </url> 
	 {/exp:weblog:entries} 
	 {exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}" offset="30" 
		limit="500" disable="categories|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks" rdf="off" dynamic="off" status="Open"} 
	 <url> 
		<loc>{title_permalink="{template_group_name}"}</loc> 
		<lastmod>{gmt_edit_date format='%Y-%m-T;%H:%i:%s%Q'}</lastmod> 
		<changefreq>monthly</changefreq> 
		<priority>0.5</priority> 
	 </url> 
	 {/exp:weblog:entries} 
</urlset>

Step 2: Create a PHP sitemap file for each blog

In this step you need to use an FTP client, web administration page, or whatever you do to create files on your web server. In this case, you will need to create some files in your site’s root directory (EE’s installation directory). For me, that is public_html.

You can use whatever naming convention you want, but I chose to use: sitemap-[blog-name].php. So I created three files for my site: sitemap-action.php, sitemap-word.php, sitemap-bryce.php. Each file will contain code that looks like this:

<?php 
// Prevent content to be cached 
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Content was generated on past 
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT"); //Content is always modified 

// Inform user agent that content is XML and is UTF-8 encoded 
header('Content-type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8'); 

// Read content from template and show it 
@readfile ('http://ebohling.com/word/sitemap/'); 
?>

Note: you will need to change the readfile string to match the URL to your sitemap in Step 1.

Step 3: Create a sitemap.php file

Again, using the tool you used in Step 2, create a sitemap.php file and use similar code as follows:

<?php 
// Prevent content to be cached 
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Content was generated on past 
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT"); //Content is always modified 

// Inform user agent that content is XML and is UTF-8 encoded 
header(&apos;Content-type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8&apos;); 

echo "<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">";
echo "<sitemap>";
echo "<loc>http://ebohling.com/sitemap-action.php</loc>";
echo "<lastmod>" . date(DATE_ATOM,mktime(0,0,0,10,3,1975)) . "</lastmod>";
echo "</sitemap>";
echo "<sitemap>";
echo "<loc>http://ebohling.com/sitemap-word.php</loc>";
echo "<lastmod>" . date(DATE_ATOM,mktime(0,0,0,10,3,1975)) . "</lastmod>";
echo "</sitemap>";
echo "</sitemapindex>";
?>

Make sure you the loc tags to match the URLs to your PHP sitemap files that you created in Step 2.

Step 4: Update your .htaccess file if necessary

If you are using an .htaccess file to remove index.php, then you will need to update this file. There are many ways to implement this feature as explained on ExpressionEngine’s wiki, so my sample code may not work for you. But with a little effort, hopefully you will be able to apply the idea to your particular implementation.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(galleries|css|images|corelib|themes|favicon.ico|robots.txt|index.php|phpinfo.php|sitemap.php|sitemap-word.php|sitemap-action.php) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

Note: corelib equates to ExpressionEngine’s core library directory which you should have renamed on installation, so make sure you tweak accordingly. As well as your sitemap names.

Step 5: Validate Sitemaps

First you will need to validate each of your sitemaps. I use the validation tool supplied by XML-Sitemaps. The sitemaps you will need to validate are your sitemap-[blog-name].php (or whatever naming convention you used). So for me: http://ebohling.com/sitemap-action.php, http://ebohling.com/sitemap-bryce.php, and http://ebohling.com/sitemap-word.php. This will not only validate that your sitemap is well-formed, but also that your code in your PHP file and .htaccess file is up to snuff. If you simply want to validate the sitemap you can first validate using your template URL. For me, http://ebohling.com/word/sitemap.

Unfortunately you CANNOT validate the sitemap index (http://ebohling.com/sitemap.php) using this tool. You will need to use Google’s validtor.

As you can see this wasn’t exactly easy. Quite a few steps and a lot can go wrong at each step. Hopefully this will provide you a starting point though and save you some time. Good luck!

2008-01-10