== Generate Sitemap Plugin

Originally Authored by Chris Marting (http://chriscodes.com/articles/view/54) Updates by Tom Cocca Updates include: - Adding a YAML config file to set URL and Change Frequency

== Generate Sitemap Rake Task

This is a Rails plugin that consists of a rake task to generate a sitemap.xml file. The task crawls a domain (specified in a YAML config per environment) for all it's url's, then builds the sitemap.xml file in public.

Since this simply crawls a domain for url's, this could be used to generate sitemaps for any site, not just a Rails application.

== Requirements

Both of these are available via RubyGems Hpricot - http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ Builder - http://rubyforge.org/projects/builder/

== Configuration/Usage

On initialization generate_sitemap will copy the generate_sitemap_key.yml file you your RAILS_ROOT/config directory.

Open this file and specify your domain for the different environments and specify the changefreq for your site.

For changefreq options see this page: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php I haven't devised a way to set this dynamically, as most pages will vary.

The plugin will pull the correct domain name for crawling the site by using the RAILS_ENV variable in the rake task.

Run the task with the command rake plugin:generate_sitemap

Go to http://localhost:3000/sitemap.xml (or open public/sitemap.xml)

== TODO

• set changefreq, lastmod, priority dynamically during generation
• allow generation of sitemap index files
• write tests
• allow for exclusions to be specified in an array

== More Info

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Questions, comments, patches, etc. can be sent to tom dot cocca at gmail dot com