Sitemap XML

Sitemap are XML files following the XML sitemap format and endorsed by search tools (like Google sitemap XML) to improve your SEO on contents.

Lotus implements Sitemap classes for Article, Category, Author and Tag content types.

Install

You just need to enable the Django sitemap framework in enabled applications before the line for Lotus:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    "django.contrib.sitemaps",
    ...
    "lotus",
)

Options

Each included sitemap class support some options that can be defined from settings. From default Lotus settings classes just define changefreq to monthly and priority to 0.5, see Settings for a detail of supported options.

Translation mode

Default Django Sitemap way to support translation is just to prefix the same url with language code. Like for exemple an english object with URL http://foo.com/en/cheese/ and enabled english and french languages it would results on something like this:

<url>
   <loc>http://foo.com/en/cheese/</loc>
   <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://foo.com/fr/cheese/" />
</url>

But Lotus translations are different objects with their own slug and URL, so our Sitemap classes with translated objects have the translation mode enabled on default to endorse this specifity.

This mode will only list original objects then add their possible translations as alternate items with their own URL:

<url>
   <loc>http://foo.com/en/cheese/</loc>
   <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://foo.com/fr/fromage/" />
</url>

If this is not your expected behavior, you may disable this mode and it will just list every objects:

<url>
   <loc>http://foo.com/en/cheese/</loc>
</url>
<url>
   <loc>http://foo.com/fr/fromage/</loc>
</url>

Publish

At this point no sitemap are published yet since Lotus let you do it yourself. This is because you may not want to enable every content sitemap, sometime you may not want to publish a sitemap for tags or authors.

There is also some options for each sitemap you would want to adjust for your SEO strategy.

We recommend to publish a sitemap per content type with an index:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import views as sitemap_views
from django.urls import path

from lotus.sitemaps import ArticleSitemap, AuthorSitemap, CategorySitemap, TagSitemap

# Enabled sitemap classes with their section name
sitemap_classes = {
    "lotus-article": ArticleSitemap,
    "lotus-author": AuthorSitemap,
    "lotus-category": CategorySitemap,
    "lotus-tag": TagSitemap,
}

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path("sitemap.xml", sitemap_views.index, {"sitemaps": sitemap_classes}),
    path(
        "sitemap-<section>.xml",
        sitemap_views.sitemap,
        {"sitemaps": sitemap_classes},
        name="django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap"
    ),
]

This will publish a /sitemap.xml which is an index of available content sitemaps, in this configuration you will get /sitemap-lotus-article.xml for the Article sitemap and the same kind of URLs for Author, Category and Tag sitemaps.

Hint

This is just a recommendation and finally you can use the Lotus sitemap classes as you want, see Django sitemap framework documentation to know how the sitemap classes and views are working.