Sitemap XML for Sitecore

22 September 2014

The simplest description of a Sitemap is a file that list all the URL’s on a site for a Search Engine to crawl. Traditionally web crawlers would follow links on pages within a site and rely on them to discover new pages and index them. Sitemaps add a layer of intelligence to this by providing a list of URL’s up front and also adding additional metadata such as when the page was last updates, how often it changes and how important the page is.

For more information on Sitemaps have a look at sitemaps.org

Introducing Sitemap XML for Sitecore

Out of the box Sitecore doesn’t provide any built in functionality for auto generating a sitemap, but a good module on the Sitecore Marketplace is Sitemap XML (https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Sitemap_XML.aspx). This module will generate a schema compliant sitemap file in the root of your site on each publish of the site.

There are a couple of issue you might experience when trying to use it:

Publishing Error

Once you’ve installed the module and attempted a full site publish you will likely get an error like this…

1Job started: Publish to 'web'|Items created: 0|Items deleted: 0|Items updated: 78|Items skipped: 15877|#Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---&gt; System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
2 at Sitecore.Modules.SitemapXML.SitemapManager.BuildSiteMap(String sitename, String sitemapUrlNew)
3 at Sitecore.Modules.SitemapXML.SitemapManager..ctor()
4 at Sitecore.Modules.SitemapXML.SitemapHandler.RefreshSitemap(Object sender, EventArgs args)
5 at Sitecore.Events.Event.EventSubscribers.RaiseEvent(String eventName, Object[] parameters, EventResult result)
6 at Sitecore.Events.Event.RaiseEvent(String eventName, Object[] parameters)
7 at Sitecore.Publishing.Publisher.NotifyEnd()
8 at Sitecore.Publishing.Publisher.Publish()
9 --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
10 at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor)
11 at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.UnsafeInvokeInternal(Object obj, Object[] parameters, Object[] arguments)
12 at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
13 at System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke(Object obj, Object[] parameters)
14 at (Object , Object[] )
15 at Sitecore.Pipelines.CorePipeline.Run(PipelineArgs args)
16 at Sitecore.Jobs.Job.ThreadEntry(Object state)

Going by the comments on the Sitecore marketplace this happens to quite a lot of people and unfortunately the limited documentation for the module doesn't explain the cause.

When you install the module it will create a config file called SitemapXML.config within App_Config\Include. By default that config will have the following 2 lines:

1<site name="website_1" filename="sitemap1.xml" serverUrl="www.site1domain.com" />
2<site name="website_2" filename="sitemap2.xml" serverUrl="www.site2domain.com"/>

These websites don't exist which is what causes the error. So to fix simply change the name of your website and the URL can be left blank. e.g.

1<site name="website" filename="sitemap.xml" serverUrl="" />

Multiple Server Setup

If you're Sitecore installation is using separate servers for content management and content delivery you'll notice that your only generating sitemaps on your content management server.

To set up your content delivery server to start generating the files update the event node in the config file from

1<event name="publish:end">

1<event name="publish:end:remote">

and also make sure you have both the SitemapXML.dll file and config file on your content deliver server.

Creating 301 redirects in web.config

20 November 2013

For various reasons at times you may need to create a 301 redirect to another URL. This could be as a result of a page moving or you just need to create some friendly URLS.

As a developer you may be tempted to do something like this in code...

1private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
2{
3    Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
4    Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
5}

But do you really want your project cluttered up with files who's only purpose is to redirect to another page!

You may also be tempted to try doing something with .NET's RouteCollection. This would certainly solve an issue on creating a redirect for anything without a file extension, but there is a better way.

In your web.config file under the configuration node create something like this

1<location path="twitter">
2  <system.webServer>
3    <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="http://twitter.com/TwitterName" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
4  </system.webServer>
5</location>

The location path specifies that path on your site that this redirect will apply to. The destination value in the httpRedirect is where the redirect will go to. As well as setting Permanent for the httpResponseStatus you can also specify Found or Temporary depending on your needs.

HTML5 Series - Semantic Tags

5 December 2012

Before HTML5 the HTML for your page's layout was probably primarily made up of a lot of div tags with id's a class's to give them a visual structure and layout. It might look something like this...

1<div id="header">My Site Name</div>
2<div id="content">Bla bla bla site content......</div>
3<div id="footer">Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</div>

This though has 2 problems. Firstly it's not great for computers like search engines or screen readers to understand as everything is a div. There is extra code you can add to improve on this (have a look at Scheme.org). Secondly your code isn't very, again because everything is a div.

HTML5 however introduces new semantic tags like <header>and
<footer> to make your data more structured. So the above example would become...

1<header>My Site Name</header>
2<article>Bla bla bla site content......</article>
3<footer>Privacy policy, copywrite info etc</footer>

Other tags are as follows:

Tag Description

<article> For external content, like text from a news-article, blog, forum, or any other content from an external source

<aside> For content aside from the content it is placed in. The aside content should be related to the surrounding content

<details> For describing details about a document, or parts of a document

<summary> A caption, or summary, inside the details element

<figure> For grouping a section of stand-alone content, could be a video

<figcaption> The caption of the figure section

<footer> For a footer of a document or section, could include the name of the author, the date of the document, contact information, or copyright information

<header> For an introduction of a document or section, could include navigation

<hgroup> For a section of headings, using

<h1> to <h6>, where the largest is the main heading of the section, and the others are sub-headings

<mark> For text that should be highlighted

<meter> For a measurement, used only if the maximum and minimum values are known

<nav> For a section of navigation

<progress> The state of a work in progress

<section> For a section in a document. Such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document

<time> For defining a time or a date, or both