Sitemap

DJ Press provides sitemap support for your site’s content through Django’s built-in sitemap framework. This allows search engines to more intelligently crawl your site by providing information about:

Blog posts
Static pages
Category archives
Date-based archives

Setup

Note: please refer to the current, official Django documentation for up-to-date instructions on how to configure sitemaps: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/contrib/sitemaps/. The following information should be seen as a guide only and may need modifying for your specific requirements.

First, ensure Django’s sitemap framework is installed. Add django.contrib.sitemaps to your INSTALLED_APPS:
```
INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    'django.contrib.sitemaps',
    ...
]
```

Import the DJ Press sitemap classes in your project’s urls.py:

from django.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap
from djpress.sitemaps import (
    CategorySitemap,
    DateBasedSitemap,
    PageSitemap,
    PostSitemap,
)

# Define your sitemaps dictionary
sitemaps = {
    'posts': PostSitemap,
    'pages': PageSitemap,
    'categories': CategorySitemap,
    'archives': DateBasedSitemap,
}

# Add the sitemap URL patterns
urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path("sitemap.xml", sitemap, {"sitemaps": sitemaps}, name="django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap"),
    ...
]

That’s it! Your site will now have a sitemap at /sitemap.xml that includes all your site’s content.

What’s Included

The sitemap will include URLs for:

Posts: All published blog posts
Pages: All published static pages
Categories: All categories that contain published posts
Archives: Date-based archives (year, month, day) that contain posts

Each URL in the sitemap includes:

The location (URL) of the content
Last modified date
Change frequency
Protocol (https by default)

Customisation

Disabling Sections

You can choose which sections to include in your sitemap by only adding the desired classes to your sitemaps dictionary. For example, to only include posts and pages:

sitemaps = {
    'posts': PostSitemap,
    'pages': PageSitemap,
}

Date-based Archives

The date-based archives sitemap respects your DJ Press archive settings. If you have disabled archives in your DJ Press settings (ARCHIVE_ENABLED = False), the archive URLs will not be included in the sitemap.

Protocol

By default, all URLs in the sitemap use the HTTPS protocol. To change this, subclass any of the sitemap classes:

from djpress.sitemaps import PostSitemap

class CustomPostSitemap(PostSitemap):
    protocol = 'http'

sitemaps = {
    'posts': CustomPostSitemap,
    ...
}

Change Frequencies

The default change frequencies are:

Posts: monthly
Pages: monthly
Categories: daily
Archives: daily

To customize these, subclass the relevant sitemap class:

from djpress.sitemaps import PostSitemap

class CustomPostSitemap(PostSitemap):
    changefreq = 'weekly'

sitemaps = {
    'posts': CustomPostSitemap,
    ...
}

Performance

The sitemap classes are designed to work efficiently with Django’s ORM and respect DJ Press’s caching settings. However, for sites with many posts, you may want to consider implementing caching for the sitemap views.

Caching can be complex to implement depending on your site’s set up, but as an example, to cache the sitemap, use Django’s cache framework:

from django.views.decorators.cache import cache_page

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    path('sitemap.xml', cache_page(86400)(sitemap),  # Cache for 24 hours
         {'sitemaps': sitemaps},
         name='django.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap'),
    ...
]

Generating the Sitemap

Once configured, your sitemap will be available at /sitemap.xml. You can verify it’s working by visiting this URL in your browser or using a tool like curl:

curl http://your-site.com/sitemap.xml

The sitemap follows the sitemaps.org protocol and can be submitted to search engines through their respective webmaster tools.