Building findable sites
I'm wondering if Harmony currently does the following, and if not, if you have any plans for adding such functionality:
- Automatically generating an XML sitemap
- Pinging Google, Yahoo, Bing, Pingomatic.com (etc) when new content is published
Pretty standard (and simple) CMS features which, in my experience, have greatly increased the findability of my sites. Thanks!
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Support Staff 2 Posted by Steve Smith on 10 May, 2010 02:58 PM
These are both things that we've been looking into, and plan to implement in the future. The sitemap is a relatively simple feature, with a few complexities based on how we use the site structure to generate pages (not all pages are 'pages', some just store data) so we need to resolve those issues before we can create the sitemap.
3 Posted by Kyle Fox on 11 May, 2010 01:38 AM
Cool, thanks for the response. For the CMS product I worked on we had a "Show in Sitemap" option (along with changefreq & priority) in the item's options, similar to how you guys have "Show in navigation".
Even having a basic sitemap that contained items and blogs (without necessarily containing entries for archives, labels, etc) would cover 90% of the use-case. It would be sufficient if the sitemap simply contained items and the top-level blog index pages.
You guys are probably already aware of this, but it's also possible to create an index sitemap which points to a sitemap for each section of the site. This would be a simple way to include all the archive, labels, etc. at /sitemap.xml without making it a 10MB file: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index
4 Posted by Kyle Fox on 11 May, 2010 12:56 PM
I'm trying to find a workaround for the sitemap, so I created a
sitemap.xmlpage. But I see it gets served as text/html, so that won't work. Any other suggestions? I apologize for my pushiness -- but this sitemap thing could mean I can't use Harmony for this particular client project any longer :(Sort of related: while thinking about the "sitemap.xml" page, I thought it might be cool if you guys guessed the mime-type to serve based on the file extension. You could do some really powerful stuff with that, and it would be relatively simple to implement. Basically you'd be able to create an ad-hoc API for your own site.
My background is building portfolio websites for photographers, and having a feature like that in a hosted CMS would be mind-blowingly awesome.
Thanks again!
Support Staff 5 Posted by Steve Smith on 13 May, 2010 03:44 PM
Don't worry about how the sitemap.xml file is served, especially in development. Google won't care about the type, and once the file is cached in our system, it will serve it properly.
Kyle Fox closed this discussion on 25 Jun, 2011 05:06 PM.