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.

Setup automatic pinging

GoogleSitemap::enable_google_notification();

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

class MyDataObject extends DataObject {
	
	function canView() {
		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.

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(), So instead of the previous code you would write:

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

See the following blog post for more information:

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

Including other routes

If your project has routes that are not stored in the database such as custom controllers and actions, the module provides an extension hook called updateItems which allows anyone to write extensions to alter the provided items.

Here's an example of registering the MyController/about URL which is defined as an action. First we create our new extension and define the links we wish to add to the $items list.

<?php

class GoogleSitemapExtension extends Extension {
	
	public function updateItems($items) {
		$base = Director::absoluteBaseUrl();
		$routes = array(
			'/MyController/',
			'/MyController/about/'
		);

		foreach($routes as $route) {
			$items->push(new ArrayData(array(
				'AbsoluteLink' => Controller::join_links($base, $route)
			)));
		}
	}
}

Before we can see the updates we first must add this extension to our built in class. Inside your mysite/_config.php file add the following:

Object::add_extension('GoogleSitemap', 'GoogleSitemapExtension');