Dynamic Sitemaps

Tom Zito

ITS Knowledge Management

What are Dynamic Sitemaps?

  • Dynamically generated lists of all the files in your site?
  • Fancy DHTML "AJAX" menus?
  • Googlewhacking will tell you both, so..
  • I'll demo both here..
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Generating a sitemap

no handout

Cool things about this script

  • Can configure it to exclude directories
  • Need to explicitly include filetypes (php, html, jpg)
  • Can explicitly exclude any files.
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Problems with this script

  • Tabular layout with images.
  • Directory tree structure unmodifiable.
  • Uses image-icons - have to make new images for filetypes.
  • Just ugly, so I decided to hack it.
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What did I do?

  • Split it into 2 files config.inc.php and sitemap-lists.php
  • Rewrote the logic to output directories/files as nested UL LI combos.
  • e.g. sitemap text
  • Why? Now we have a true structural layout that we can play with and configure easily.
  • Split the script to make it easier to separate the configuration from the script itself.

    • Splitting apart Content and Display

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    Making it into menus

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    Integration with my homepage

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    Finally

    • Limitations of this implementation - can configure only a directory name, not path.
    • Should grab the <title> element out of the html files and use that for the link instead of the file name.
    • CSS only degrades gracefully but because of IE6 limited CSS selector support does not give you submenus
    • Should have some metadata in directories (like an info.txt file) that the script reads
    • "The greatest failures in our study came from site maps that attempted to lure the user into a dynamically twisting and expanding view, rather than presenting a simple, static representation of the information architecture... A site map should not be a navigational challenge of its own. It should be a map... Site maps should be simple, compact layouts of links, and they should show everything in a single view."
      http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020106.html
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