Symetrik Domino Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Web Development’

I have been building quite a few sites with WordPress lately. WordPress has quite a long list of 3rd party plugins developed for various tasks and functions.

One downside to this is that there are several redundant WordPress plugins for common tasks, and their plugin search mechanism which is located at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ is somewhat difficult to use.

I tend to search for the most installed or popular plugins and use the hive mind’s collective research to choose which plugin is the best, most robust, and best supported. Installing the most installed plugin does not always ensure that it is the best plugin, so I tend to test different WordPress plugins from time to time.

Recently, I installed Khang Minh’s XML Sitemap plugin called “Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps (with sitemapindex and Multi-site support).” This creates a sitemapindex.xml file which references several other sub-sitemaps. This is the new trend in XML sitemaps because there is a 50,000 entry limit for a single sitemap file. By splitting the sitemaps into sub-sitemaps, you can broaden the number of items that you can index.

You can get the plugin from the WordPress plugin project page here. You can also visit Khang Minh’s website at http://betterwp.net/ which also showcases his several other WordPress plugins.

I also want to note that I had a problem with the plugin. The category sitemap wouldn’t generate. I posted a bug report to the issue queue, and he contacted me via Skype and did some testing on my WordPress installation. He found a bug with the code, fixed it, and created a new patch. The problem was with my database, there were several posts had been deleted, but were still categorized as “Uncategorized” which is the default WordPress category for new posts.

This is absolutely the best support I have ever received from a WordPress plugin or Drupal module developer. I have to say that he was a very nice guy, fixed the problem, and devoted his time to not only resolving my individual issue, but creating a patch to fix the particular scenario for the greater community as a whole.

I have not found any problems with any of the other WordPress XML sitemap plugins, but I will use the Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps (with sitemapindex and Multi-site support) due to the high level of support that Khang Minh provides. His plugins seem solid and he has written and maintains several, so he has a high familiarity with the WordPress framework.

Other XML Sitemap Plugins of note are as follows:

• Google XML Sitemaps – this is the most popular XML Sitemap plugin, but it creates a single sitemap.xml file.
• Yoast’s SEO Ultimate also includes an XML sitemap generator, with very few options.