silverstripe-googlesitemaps/docs/en/index.md

# Google Sitemaps Module

SilverStripe provides support for the Google Sitemaps XML system, enabling
Google and other search engines to see all pages on your site. This helps
your SilverStripe website rank well in search engines, and to encourage the
information on your site to be discovered by Google quickly.

Therefore, all Silverstripe websites contain a special controller which can be
visited: http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. This is not a file directly, but
rather a custom route which points to the GoogleSitemap controller.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps for info on the Google Sitemap
format.

Whenever you publish a new or republish an existing page, SilverStripe can
automatically inform Google of the change, encouraging a Google to take notice.
If you install the SilverStripe Google Analytics module, you can see if Google
has updated your page as a result.

By default, SilverStripe informs Google that the importance of a page depends
on its position of in the sitemap. "Top level" pages are most important, and
the deeper a page is nested, the less important it is. (For each level,
Importance drops from 1.0, to 0.9, to 0.8, and so on, until 0.1 is reached).

In the CMS, in the Settings tab for each page, you can set the importance
manually, including requesting to have the page excluded from the sitemap.

## Configuration

Most module configuration is done via the SilverStripe Config API. Create a new
config file `mysite/_config/googlesitemaps.yml` with the following outline:

	---
	Name: customgooglesitemaps
	After: googlesitemaps
	---
	Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap:
  		enabled: true
  		objects_per_sitemap: 1000
  		google_notification_enabled: false
  		use_show_in_search: true

You can now alter any of those properties to set your needs. A popular option
is to turn on automatic pinging so that Google is notified of any updates to
your page. You can set this in the file we created in the last paragraph by
editing the `google_notification_enabled` option to true

	---
	Name: customgooglesitemaps
	After: googlesitemaps
	---
	Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap:
  		enabled: true
  		objects_per_sitemap: 1000
  		google_notification_enabled: true
  		use_show_in_search: true

### Bing Ping Support

To ping Bing whenever your sitemap is updated, set `bing_notification_enabled`

    ---
    Name: customgooglesitemaps
    After: googlesitemaps
    ---
    Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap:
        enabled: true
        bing_notification_enabled: true

### Including DataObjects

The module provides support for including DataObject subclasses as pages in the
SiteTree such as comments, forum posts and other pages which are stored in your
database as DataObject subclasses.

To include a DataObject instance in the Sitemap it requires that your subclass
defines two functions:

 * AbsoluteLink() function which returns the URL for this DataObject
 * canView() function which returns a boolean value.

The following is a barebones example of a DataObject called 'MyDataObject'. It
assumes that you have a controller called 'MyController' which has a show method
to show the DataObject by its ID.

	<?php

    use SilverStripe\ORM\DataObject;
    use SilverStripe\Control\Director;

	class MyDataObject extends DataObject {

		function canView($member = null) {
			return true;
		}

		function AbsoluteLink() {
			return Director::absoluteURL($this->Link());
		}

		function Link() {
			return 'MyController/show/'. $this->ID;
		}
	}


After those methods have been defined on your DataObject you now need to tell
the Google Sitemaps module that it should be listed in the sitemap.xml file. To
do that, include the following in your _config.php file.

    use Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap;

	GoogleSitemap::register_dataobject('MyDataObject');

If you need to change the frequency of the indexing, you can pass the change
frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) as a second parameter to register_dataobject(), So
instead of the previous code you would write:

    use Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap;

	GoogleSitemap::register_dataobject('MyDataObject', 'daily');

See the following blog post for more information:

http://www.silvercart.org/blog/dataobjects-and-googlesitemaps/

### Including custom routes

Occasionally you may have a need to include custom url's in your sitemap for
your Controllers and other pages which don't exist in the database. To update
the sitemap to include those links call register_routes() with your array of
urls to include.

    use Wilr\GoogleSitemaps\GoogleSitemap;

	GoogleSitemap::register_routes(array(
		'/my-custom-controller/',
		'/Security/',
		'/Security/login/'
	));