SiteTree 6.0: Site Tree Pagination and XML Sitemap Index
Two automated functionalities targeted on fast growing websites and on websites which are already modest in size.
Do you like the new icon? The slight refresh hasn't changed its meaning — something I will tell you about some other time — but it adds-up to an update that introduces in SiteTree two functionalities previously exclusive to Demux Leaf: the ability to produce a multi-page Site Tree and that of creating collections of XML sitemaps.
The two functionalities are mainly targeted at fast growing websites and websites which are already modest in size. It will not come as a surprise that they are both fully automated, like most of the other functionalities of SiteTree. But I don't want to make you wait any longer, now I go into details.
Site Tree Pagination
The Pagination facility untangles the usability of a medium-to-large Site Tree without overloading the server. It is user-centric, and has been finely tuned.
The user-centricity is a distinctive feature of the navigation menu tailing the Site Tree, designed to mimic in behaviour the navigation menu used by Google in their pages of search results. Whereas, being fine-tuned means that the plugin exactly knows when a hyper-list composing your Site Tree must be spread between multiple pages or can be left untouched.
Just a note: after the upgrade you might need to act on the 'Max. number of items' setting in the 'Site Tree Settings' screen to allow SiteTree to show the whole list of your Posts or Custom Posts.
XML Sitemap Index, and Collections of Sitemaps
Splitting up a large sitemap and building a Sitemap Index is always a good idea when a website is expanding, but it is also a good solution to keep the permalinks in your Google Sitemap organised: SiteTree creates a distinct sitemap, or a group of sitemaps, for each type of content the included permalinks belong to. That doesn't mean only better performance in serving sitemaps, but also easier error detection. Actually, there is also the chance that Googlebot will virtually thank you for having set up such functionality on your website: an improvement in crawling performance doesn't benefit only your website.
Never-changeable Sitemap Location
This feature will definitely not fall in the background if the posting schedule for your News website is very dynamic: the ability to automatically jump back and forth from single to multiple sitemaps mode based on how many news are there to list and the never-changeability of the location of the sitemap are features that become more and more dependable as you keep publishing.
Even this time around, your feedbacks have proven to be a valuable asset, so — thank you.