Create a user friendly sitemap

This is a post on how to create a user friendly sitemap for WordPress blogs.

Do this and you have a autogenerating user friendly sitemap.

This is how it looks: Sitemap

This Includes 2 steps

1: Make an autogenerating xml sitemap compatible with Google sitemaps.

2: Install a stylesheet for the xml sitemap.

STEP 1

Download and install the XML sitemap generator

Link to plugin site: google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

Send in your sitemap to Google sitmaps.
If you do not already have a Google sitemap account sign up here

You should now have a fully working .xml Google sitemap.

STEP 2

Visit Enarion.net and download gss-1.5a.zip

Upload the file to your server.

Now as you can see at the style sheet page you are instructed to add:

< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?>
directly under
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

in your sitemap.xml file.

But the problem is that each time your sitemap.xml file gets regenerated it over writes your precious < ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?> command.

How do we solve the problem then?

Just add this piece of code in your sitemap.php file which should be located at: /yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/sitemap.incl.lang/

$s=’< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?>‘. “\n”;

The code should be placed directly under:
$s=’< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"' . '?' . '>‘. “\n”;

(If you can not find that piece of code use the search function on your FTP client.)

That´s it! now your sitemap.xml is compatible both to Google sitemaps and for visitors to use.

See the result and how it looks for this domain: Westberg Sitemap

Positive

You get an autogenerating sitemap

Your visitors can easy use the sitemap and its functions

You get the .xml file to be usable for both Google and visitors

Very easy to implement

It also Includes a great sitemap menu so that you can choose yourself what you want indexed in the sitemap such as following:

Include homepage

Include posts

Include static pages

Include categories

Include archives

Negative

You will have 11 external links on your sitemap

Have not figured out how to make it work with firefox

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