django-static-sitemaps 1.5.0

UNKNOWN

There are times when your site is too big to serve the sitemap.xml by your Django application. This little app is meant to help you with such cases. Instead of serving the sitemap.xml from Django, it features a management command that generates the sitemap.xml to the separate files.

Feature highlights:

• Generate sitemap files to your STATIC/MEDIA/(own choice) directory

• Split sitemap files when limit for size is reached

• Gzip the sitemap files when required

• Set different domain for sitemap file

• Ping google that sitemap has changed

Requirements

The only requirement is Django 1.3+. App should work with older Django versions with some settings tweaks. In matter of fact just defining STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_DIR (in case you have no STATIC_ROOT defined) should be enough.

Usage

Install via standard Python way:

pip install django-static-sitemaps

Add to you INSTALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
        ...
        'static_sitemaps',
        ...
)

Set STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_SITEMAP variable in your settings.py to point to dictionary holding the sitemaps configuration (as seen in Django docs):

STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_SITEMAP = 'myproject.sitemaps.sitemaps'

Include static_sitemaps.urls to your urls.py to serve the root sitemap.xml if you want to serve index file through Django (might be usefull sometimes when it’s hard for you to serve it by webserver itself):

urlpatterns = patterns('',
        url(r'^sitemap.xml', include('static_sitemaps.urls')),
)

Setup your cron to run:

django-admin.py refresh_sitemap

periodically. Usually, it’s enough to set it to run once by 30 minutes or so.

Done.

Note: Your sitemap files will be served from STATIC_URL by default. If your STATIC_URL is a relative one (e.g. /static/), the result will be prepended the domain to respect the current Site object. If your STATIC_URL is absolute (generally doesn’t start with a ‘/’), sitemaps URL will respect it completely. If you need more detailed control, see STATICSITEMAPS_DOMAIN setting.

Note about sitemap index lastmod: In the static_sitemaps app the sitemaps index works slightly different than the Django’s default behaviour. Just like Django it also gathers all urls from the generated sitemaps but it also includes a new XML tag lastmod. The date/time set in this tag comes from the first element of the generated file, so reverse sorting your query by your date field will keep this information accurate. This is important to inform the crawler how fresh is the information inside each sitemap inside the sitemap_index.xml.

Advanced settings

STATICSITEMAPS_ROOT_DIR

Filesystem path to generate the sitemaps files to. Defaults to STATIC_ROOT directory.

STATICSITEMAPS_USE_GZIP

Defaults to True. If True, gzip compression will be used when generating the sitemaps files (which is very possible by sitemaps specification).

STATICSITEMAPS_FILENAME_TEMPLATE

Template for sitemap parts. Defaults to sitemap-%(section)s-%(page)s.xml.

STATICSITEMAPS_INDEX_TEMPLATE

Template path for sitemap index. Defaults to static_sitemaps/sitemap_index.xml.

STATICSITEMAPS_DOMAIN

Set this to the domain from which you serve static files in case it it different from domain of your Django application. Defaults to current site’s domain.

STATICSITEMAPS_LANGUAGE

Language code to use when generating the sitemaps. Defaults to LANGUAGE_CODE setting.

STATICSITEMAPS_PING_GOOGLE

Boolean determining whether to ping google after sitemaps have been updated. Defaults to True.

Using a custom template

If you need to use a template different from the Django’s default (for example to generate a Google News sitemap) you can extend the you Sitemap class and setting a sitemap_template attribute. For Example:

from django.contrib.sitemaps import GenericSitemap

class GoogleNewsSitemap(GenericSitemap):
    sitemap_template = 'sitemap_googlenews.xml'