A site map is a great addition to your Web site.
Site maps are used on all kinds of Web sites, and what they are is a whole bunch
of links for your Web site, all on one page; links to every page of your Web site, ideally.
This is a great thing for search engines, they can come to this page, they can
spider through all of the content on your Web site very quickly and easily, and
there are some people that just prefer surfing the Web using a site map, and the
reason is they don't have to figure out your navigation.
They can simply go through, and click on everything that's in the site map, and
visit those pages on your Web site.
So there's nothing wrong with including a site map, and Xmap here is a very
quick and easy way to add this in Joomla.
Xmap has been around for years, and it has a very nice looking site map that you
can easily install on your Web site.
So to do this, we are going to scroll on down to the bottom of the page here, and
we have three choices. Two are for versions of Joomla
that are no longer supported. The last one here is for Xmap, and version 2.5 or 3.
So I am going to go ahead and click that, and I am going to save this on down to
my computer here, and then I am going to hop here to the back-end of the Web site,
and I am going to install this extension, and I can do that through
Extensions > Extension Manager, or I can click on Install Extensions over here on
the left side of the screen.
Either way, it takes you to the same place, and I am going to go ahead and browse
for my Xmap extension, and I am going to say Upload & Install.
And I get a message that this was installed successfully.
Xmap is a component, so I'm going to look for its configuration screens on the
Components menu, going down here to Xmap, and here it shows me that I have
currently no Sitemaps.
Well, I can fix that by clicking the New button here.
I'll give this a title, like Site Map, and I am going to set this to Published.
Then here under Menus, I can specify which menus of information I'd like to
display on the Web site.
I'd like to display the English menu, the Footer menu, and the Italian menu.
I don't really want to display Main Menu. Remember, that has one link on it; it
goes to the Home page with the language of All. And I am going to reorder these,
so that the Footer menu comes after the Italian menu.
I have some other options here.
I can choose to show some Intro text; that would be some text that would appear
at the top of the page.
You can enter that here on the Sitemap Details page down here in this box.
I can show the Menu title associated with each one of my menus, so it would
say something like English menu, followed by the menu, and Italian menu, followed by the menu.
I actually don't want to show my Menu title,
so I am going to say No for that.
I can specify any kind of CSS class names I might want associated with this
particular page, and the number of columns that the site map might display in.
Sometimes you have a really, really long site map, and rather than scrolling down
forever, it just works better to display it in columns on the page.
I have an image right now that will indicate any external links on the Web site.
It's this image_blue.gif, and of course, I could change that if I wanted to, and
that's really all I need to do here.
So I'm just going to go ahead and say Save & Close.
And here is my Site Map right here for the Web site.
Now, the next thing I want to do is configure this area called Extensions, and
this area called Extensions shows me a bunch of plug-ins associated with Xmap,
the Sitemap. And if I happen to have some of these extensions installed, then
when I enable these plug-ins, what will happen is that Xmap will spider the
content of, for example, SobiPro, or VirtueMart, or Mosets Tree, or some of
these other things.
I have the Content Plugin, so I am going to go ahead and turn that on.
I am also going to turn on the WebLinks Plugin, because I have used that as well.
I don't have Kunena, Mosets Tree, SobiPro, or VirtueMart installed, but those are
all possibilities; if I ever do install those,
I can integrate the Xmap Site map with those third party extensions.
Okay, so now that this is all set to go, I now need to show the site map on the
front-end of the Web site. Since Xmap is a component, I show it on the front-end
with the Web site through a menu item.
So I am going to go to my Menus, and I am going to put this on the Footer menu,
and I'm going to add a New menu item by clicking on the big green button, and I
am going to choose a Menu Item Type.
Now that I have installed Xmap, this automatically shows up here as a new menu item type.
Click on that, and it gives me an HTML Site map.
That's exactly what I want,
so I will pick that.
Then it's going to ask me to pick which Site map; hit the Change button here,
and I will pick my Site Map from the list, and I will give this a Menu Title of Site Map.
I can set the Language over here if I want, and I could set this to
specifically English, or Italian.
I am going to leave it set to All, because I have both the English and Italian
menu selected to show on the site map, and I could alter my Access level if I
wished up here, but I really want this site map available to everyone, so I am
going to leave that set to Public.
Go ahead and say Save & Close, and you see that we have the Site Map item
added to our Footer menu.
When I go to the front-end of the Web site, and I hit refresh, scroll on down
the page here, you will see that I have Site Map link that now appears here in the footer.
When I click on this, this is going to show me, now, all of the content that
I have on my Web site.
Notice that it's spelling out all of my blog posts, in addition to my menu items.
So this is really great.
Also notice I am only seeing my English menu, and my Footer menu. That's all.
That's because I'm on the English part of the Web site.
If I switch over to the Italian side of the Web site, and scroll to the bottom of
the page, and click on my Site Map, you'll see that I only have the Italian part
of the Site Map available to me.
Just those two links to the Italian pages, as well as the footer.
So, why is the footer showing up in both places?
Well, the footer's menu modules, as well as the footer links, all are set to a
Language of All, and what that means is it will show up on all of the languages.
So it's going to show up in Italian, and it will show up on the English side.
However, my Italian menu, and my English menu; the modules for those are
specifically mapped to certain languages, and that's why I only see links for
those languages here.
So Xmap is a great third-party extension.
It's multilanguage compatible, and I can go ahead and add a great site map to my Web site.
I can see all of the content on one page, making search engines, and other
Web site visitors very happy.