Advanced Sitemaps Advanced Sitemaps

I was going to somehow improve the indexing of my Gothic 4 fan site by placing a sitemap on the project. The whole difficulty of the task was that in addition to the usual pages (which were already indexed normally), I needed to include news records (tt_news) there. This, in turn, automatically meant abandoning the TYPO3 basemap, which did not have this functionality. After a little searching, I still found the extension I needed – Advanced Sitemaps. In this post I will tell you a little about its capabilities and settings.

First of all, it should be noted that, according to the description, this module allows you to create completely different sitemaps – due to the support of records (for example, tt_news), as well as due to all kinds of information output formats – HTML, XML, RSS, ATOM, Google Sitemaps. Sounds really cool and flexible (right in the best traditions of CMS TYPO3). See the extension documentation for a complete list of Advanced Sitemaps features:

generating a full-fledged sitemap using a simple configuration in the TYPO3 admin panel;
customization via database records that are easy to create and modify, no need to use TypoScript;
display of any types of posts – news, products, etc .;
dynamic customization allows you to select the specific records that you need;
support for different display formats – HTML, Google Sitemaps and Google News Sitemaps.
the ability to change the template through the corresponding files, if necessary.
Installing Advanced Sitemaps
In principle, so far everything is more than good. Install the TYPO3 Advanced Sitemaps module, which can be downloaded here or found in the extension manager. The only setting that will be available at the installation stage is Allowed tables, through which you can specify the entries available for the sitemap.

Installing Advanced Sitemaps

First of all, we will create a page where our sitemap will be displayed. Next, we need to create an entry with the module settings. Select the List menu – the created page, where we add an element of the “Sitemap Configurations” type.

setting up Advanced Sitemaps

In it you will have many different options in order to specify as accurately as possible which records you want to display – define tables, set options specifically for Google Sitemaps, etc. In my case, I did the following:

selected a table (Table) – News;
sorting (Sorting) – by date, decreasing;
indicated a Startingpoint with news entries.
entered the following data in the Link configuration tab:
Advanced Sitemaps module

The last configuration defines the format for links (URLs) of certain records from tables. For news, these are:

And I want to note that the field value must begin with the “&” sign. In general, using the settings, you can display news or products for a specific category, etc. – the module is very flexible. After all this, we just save the element.

Step number 3 – go to the “Page” menu, again select the sitemap page and here, in the template, create the Advanced Sitemaps plugin element. In it, you will also need to make a couple of settings. First, define the output format – HTML. Secondly, open the Records tab, where add our created element of the module settings. That is, you first created a rule for selecting records, and then connected it to the display in the plugin. In principle, nothing complicated – we read the documentation (which is not very large) and try to create an advanced sitemap in practice.