If you have a web site and you want search engined to index your site properly you need to have sitemap for your site. Sitemap is a way to describe your web site, revealing all the static and dynamic links within your website.

I have recently been building a web site based on ROR and I was looking for a plugin to accomplish this. The plugin I used is queso/sitemap from http://github.com/queso/sitemap/tree/master. This link has instructions and also the readme with the plugin gives enough information to install this plugin. The problem I faced was with setting up widgets and the static link in the sitemap_settings link.

Since I am new to Ruby on Rails it took me a while to figure out how to setup the widgets and static link in the sitemap_settings url.  To explain how I had setup the sitemap I am going to use  the model “Term” as an example. Basically I needed Sitemap to display the url of list of terms http://www.mydomain.com/terms and all the individual terms like http://www.mydomain.com/terms/term1, http://www.mydomain.com/terms/term2 etc.

In the Widgets setting screen I added a widget named Term and entered the information as shown in the image below. The model is going to be “Term”. The named route is “terms_path” which resolves to http://www.mydomain.com/terms. Correction: The named route is “terms_url” which resolves to http://www.mydomain.com/terms. Make sure to look up your routes to see if the name route you are providing is relevant and available ( use  >> rake routes command). If you leave the finder method blank, the sitemap plugin will use find(:all) method of the model to get the list of all items in the model. Sitemap plugin is going to generate an XML comprising of the url for list of terms ( http://www.mydomain.com/terms ) and the url of individual terms (http://www.mydomain.com/terms/term1, http://www.mydomain.com/terms/term2 , etc.).

You can create a custom finder method. We have created a find_sitemap class method in the Term model as shown in the code below:

 def self.find_sitemap(*args)
    find(:all,:conditions=>['state=?','published'])
  end

 This method is going to find all terms that are in published state. One issue I ran into was the url being generated by the sitemap for the list was coming out as “/terms” instead of “http://www.mydomain.com/terms”. I had to hack the sitemap code to get this right. I had to change the code in show.xml.builder of the sitemap plugin. The code block is shown below. The following was added in line 3 in the url_for method: “root_url.chop + “. I am not sure if this is the most graceful way but I was kind of in hurry. Pardon my ignorance. There was nothing wrong with the sitemap plugin it expects a named url ( contains the entire url) instead of the path ( contains relative path). The named route in the following image should be “terms_url” instead of “terms_path”.

Sitemap Widget

Tags: finder, linkedin, named route, plugin, queso, rails, ror, ruby, ruby on rails, sitemap, widgets

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.