Sitemap

I would have to take a closer look at the sitemap code again, but what is happening in your example is that you have a parent category called...

provence-alpes-azur

and then under it a subcategory called....

property-provence-alps-azur

The code is set to ignore categories that dont allow ads so if you have aparent category that in and of itself is not designed to have any ads placed in it, make sure you edit that category and specify so.

As for the way the URL's are presented, it appears that the sitemap is not taking advantage of the SEO friendly URL's. Id have to dig deper into correcting that.

As for not rendering the second page, im not sure I am following you. There are no limits set in the sitemap queries so all categories and ads should have links.

If your talking about when a link to a category is followed form the sitemap I see pagination and second pages on my end.

So I hard coded in my mainly 'static' pages with the html formatted URLs. I did this for pages that do not change which I have created through the admin page editor - about 75 pages - all is fine. I have also hard coded the categories pages (html format) as well because that is pretty finite and not going to change a lot. Structurally not a lot will change. However it would be nice to sitemap the html URLs for the view listings pages which are going to change fairly regularly and there could end up being thousands of them.

Still cannot get the 2nd or 3rd page of a category to render either with the standard module code although it is clearly linked.


What is strange though is I do not see that I have a category for example provence-alpes-azur. In my example I have a top level category, called property south west france with slug property-south-west-france and this is defined as the parent category of property-provence-alpes-azur. When I use the standard categories rendering from the sitemap module it still makes the error. I wonder what it could be?

Here is the code which does not seem to work. Or more correctly seems to define categories that do not exist.

$sSQL='SELECT * FROM '.PREFIX.'categories WHERE cLink="" AND display<>"N" ORDER BY cORDER DESC, name ASC';
$result=$db->query($sSQL);
while ($rs=$result->fetch())
{
echo '<url>
<loc>'.URL.'/category.php?cat='.$rs['slug'].'</loc>
<lastmod>'.$date.'</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>';
echo "\n";
}

From this the sitemap renders property-provence-azur and provence-azur but only the former is defined in my control panel.

Your really losing me on this whole conversation.

Just to be clear the sitemap does not look at the content of your site as displayed to viewers who visit and build a list of pages from there.

The sitemap script queries the database to get categories and ads (and with my extra code static pages added via admin) and builds lnks from there.

As for building links to the viewlistings pages, they are created by 68C on thefly based on the ads in the database, they simply displays a shorthand view of the ads themselves. the sitemap already builds links to the ads themselves so building a link to a list of ads seems a little redundant especially consiering it will change every time an ad is added or removed, which is likely a lot more frequent than a search engine will hit your site.

As for getting the 2nd and 3rd page to render, I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Is this sitemap related or are you talking about when you simply goto your site and chose to view a ategory with a lot of ads, for example.....

http://www.french-property-sale.eu/categories/property-aquitaine.html

the bove category has like 50 ads and when I view the page I have page numbers to move through the various pages.

On the last point, if the one catgory doesnt actually exist but a link is being created, then my guess would be that the SEO mod is somehow affecting this.

Bad choice of words. My goal. To have a sitemap which renders (lists down ttp://www.french-property-sale.eu/modules.php?mod=sitemap.) every URL on the site with an SEO friendly format /xxxxxx.html

I think you have kind of answered my question: Just to be clear the sitemap does not look at the content of your site as displayed to viewers who visit and build a list of pages from there.

My apologies. What I was trying to say was this

The pages I defined with the page editor in the admin panel are fine. No problems. I put them directly into the sitemap/index.php file. They are not going to change. I write them in explicitly with their SEO friendly URLs. I then put the file back on the server. Regenerate the gateway, etc. All is cool.

Now for categories. I have 2 problems.

By the 2nd and 3rd pages I mean this - for example, if I browse south west france (a top level category which does not except ads) , I then choose the category called aquitaine, I then have several pages to choose from with unique URLs (page IDs) . In fact in this example there are 3 pages of listings (50 ads) within that category but only the first one is written in the sitemap file which is generated at http://www.mysite.com/modules.php?mod=sitemap. What happended to the other 2 pages? There is no url for them. I assume this is a consequence of your statement above about content of the site?

The second problem is that the sitemap file still contains caegories which do not exist. For example, it displays a url for property-aquitaine and one for a category aquitaine. Category aquitaine does not exist as far as I can see from the admin panel. I cannot see how this is occurring. why is an extra link being generated (or extra category)?

The 3rd problem is a general one. The sitemap does not generate SEO friendly URLs either.

Once again I think you are confusing the site and how its displayed to visitors with the data thats actually contained in the site itself. When a visitor hits your sites main page, clicks the browse link, chooses Property South West France and then Property Aquitaine they are seeing paginated output.

Paginated output is created for the benefit of the server and the viewer. If you have a super busy site its not realy pratical for a site to do a query on and display say 500 ads on a single page. Its also not practical to query 500 ads and only display 25 of them.

So, what happens is that of the 500 records that may be available only 25 are pulled from the data base and displayed at any given time. As you move forward and backwards through the possible pages a new 25 are pulled from the database.

Now, as far as page 2 and 3 not being displayed I still dont understand where you say they are not being generated? The sitemap is not going to generate 3 links for the above category because there are 3 pages. Its just going to generate a single link as seen below......


http://www.french-property-sale.eu/category.php?cat=property-aquitaine

Now if you goto that link you should have pagination to view the additional pages. The actual content you see when vieing a category isnt really important because it will change all of the time. Its also made up of individual ads themselves and each individual ad has its own link generated by the sitemap. So, while there is no second page link created there really doesnt need to be. The whole point is to highlight the "category" to the search engines and not so much whats actually in the categpory because the contents itself is listed as its own link.

As I mentioned and as you have likely seen, the sitemap does a query or the database and for each record that is set to not be displayed a link is generate. Perhaps the SEO mod is rewriting a link and making it invalid.

What I would recommend doing is disabling the SEO mod for a minute and then hit your sitemap URL, then match up all the category links with your categories. Then do the same after reenabling the SEO mod to see whats changed.

Got it now. I understand the difference. I can quite happily write the SEO friendly URLs into the sitemap/index.php file because that will highlight the categories which is the main goal. It also alleviates the second problem because it will only render the URLs I want into the sitemap. I will remove the code which cycles through the categories as I no longer need it. I do not get these phantom categories appearing now. The structure of my site is unlikely to change so removing that code helps (i.e areas of France do not change).

I will check problem 3 because it is rendering individual ads like this Property In France - Ancient restored farm on 20 ha in BLACK PERIGORD into http://www.mysite.eu/viewlisting.php?view=114 and not with the former SEO friendly format. My .htaccess file those is standard as was given for dealing with the indivual ads. It works fine as you can see but perhaps there is a side effect.

RewriteRule ^listing/([0-9]+)/([0-9a-zA-Z_-]+)\.html$ viewlisting.php?view=$1 [NC]

Just comment or delete that section of the sitemap script.

Since the pages and their contents are all stored in the database tables "pages" simply do a query and loop through the results creating rss as you go.

I dont understand what it is you are looking for details on, can you elaborate?