Site Map Listing Tutorial
For site maps on my sites, I always wanted a listing that just read my site from the server and made a site map "on the fly". That saves me having to maintain it - it's automagic.
That's not quite what I ended up with though. Because of Google and their service for webmasters that allows me to submit an XML file to them, I needed a way to generate that file and keep it available on my site.
In my first Site Map Tutorial, I detailed how I used a file system tree traversal routine to generate a standard Google Sitemap.xml file using PHP. This tutorial deals with the idea of using that xml file to create my site map.
It's a simple process really - not much to explain. I started with an RSS parser that I got from an article by Kevin Yank on SitePoint.com. In his article, Kevin shows how to use the standard PHP function xml_parser_create. I note both references here for those that want to delve further into how all this works.
Starting with Kevin's basic script, I made modifications to the code to read the Google sitemap.xml format. My first attempt merely listed the page URL as an <a> tag so it could be clicked to access the page. You can see an example of that here and the code I use is shown on page 2.
Next week, I'll detail further changes to this script to show how I pull the <title> tag from each page, do some basic formatting on it and use that to create my site map listing.
Feel free to contact me with any questions about this routine.