Sitemaps can be an important factor in making your site more navigable and accessible. And no, I’m not talking about the Google XML Sitemaps which you submit directly directly to Google - never to be seen by human eyes. I’m talking about an actual page on your site that has a list of all your posts and pages. There are a few helpful plugins that can help you out with this. I’ll go over some of them in this guide.
For reference on installing plugins: Please see the how to install a WordPress plugin tutorial (manual installations) and OneClick for auto installations.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
Probably one of the easiest ways to quickly set up a sitemap is the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress. All you need to do is get the plugin and install it.
You can set a number of options such as whether to display either posts, pages, or both on a configuration page.
Once all of this is configured to your liking, create a page (probably called “Sitemap”) and type the following in your code editor.
<!-- ddsitemapgen -->This will display the full sitemap listing on that page.
SRG Clean Archives
Another plugin which works in a similar way as the above is SRG Clean Archives. If you want your sitemap sorted in a monthly format, this plugin would be ideal. The settings page is a little messed up in WordPress 2.5 but the default settings should do the job anyway.
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, create a page with the following tag in the code editor.
<!--srg_clean_archives-->Once that is saved you should see the archive list generated for you on the page.
CatTagArt
To choose selectively which categories you want to display on a post or page, look no further than CatTagArt. Once installed and activated you’ll be able to configure options such as how many posts should be displayed per list among other things.
It’s very simple to use after this. Type something in like this…
[cattagart uncategorized]
…with “uncategorized” being your category or tag slug. After this is done, view the page. You should get something like this.
Conclusion
That’s about it. Hopefully you now know some new ways of publishing your own sitemap pages and designing your website for humans, not robots. You may also want to check out this post on Lorelle about Customizable Post Listings plugin. It’s a little outdated so I didn’t mention it above, although with a bit of code hacks it’ll do the job.
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Can’t wait to try this out.
This is a great article on site maps, however, some terminology needs to be clarified. A sitemap is the XML version that is hidden from users on your blog. A site map (two words) is the table of contents on your blog. I sure wish I was in charge of naming conventions so people wouldn’t get so confused.
The problem with most site maps is that they are created chronologically. What if the phone book was done that way? What if the dictionary, encyclopedia, and other table of contents listings were done that way? It’s totally useless to the user. They don’t know when something was published.
I recommend to all Plugin developers and designers to skip the chronological order of a site map. It helps no one and is totally useless. Go for categorical lists to group like-content together, a much more useful approach for the user.
@Lorelle: Nice to see you here! Oops..I didn’t realize that there was a difference between a site map and a sitemap. Always thought those words were almost interchangeable.
Anyway, I agree that related postings would be useful. But wouldn’t you think even a chronologically sorted list of posts would be helpful as well? As opposed to sifting through several pages of content and excerpts trying to find the post they may be looking for. Thanks for the comment.
This is a great plugin and it would be even better if it could work with pages as well as posts.
I also have an interesting problem. I have two blogs working in a single database. The two blogs have some categories with the same names. When I put a list of posts in one blog, it also lists posts from the other blog.
@AJ: Which plugin are you using?
Oops! Should have said. The CatTagArt plugin.