September 02, 2006 @ 07:42 PM

Please refer to the more recent article on the plugin posted here: http://exdolo.com/2007/12/9/mephisto-sitemap-plugin-goes-1-0

I’ve just finished my first real plugin for Mephisto. Allow me to introduce: the Mephisto Google Sitemap plugin.

It does pretty much what it sounds like; providing a controller and a view that create a Google Sitemap Protocol compliant XML file that describes your Mephisto blog and allows you to set some preferences on how you’d like Google to index your site (or at least suggest the same).

You do have to be signed up with Google for their Webmaster Tools to take advantage of having the sitemap on your site, but this should cut out the headache of maintaing a static XML file.

Installation

Easy peezy, lemon squeezy:

Subversion Users

  script/plugin install -x \ 
  http://svn.exdolo.com/projects/plugins/mephisto_sitemap/trunk

Non-Subversion Users

  script/plugin install \ 
  http://svn.exdolo.com/projects/plugins/mephisto_sitemap/trunk

One last important step:

Don’t forget to set the @@site_uri module attribute in lib/mephisto_google_site_map.rb (more detail in the README). While you’re there, you can customize your change frequency and priority settings.

Bugs / Patches

Feel free to leave a comment here or email me at: scaudill at gmail dot com

Update:

• Made all the constants in MephistoGoogleSiteMap module attributes.
• GoogleSiteMapController now inherits from ApplicationController so we can use the site cattr rather than Site.find(:first) and will work with multi-site setups (thanks Rick!)
• a bit of shuffling around and general cleanup

So update from trunk and don’t forget to reconfigure @@site_uri:)