Google sitemap files for Rails projects

Question

Is there an easy way to create a sitemaps file for Rails projects? Especially for dynamic sites (such as Stack Overflow for example) there should be a way to dynamically create a sitemaps file. What is the way to go in Ruby and/or Rails?

What would you suggest? Is there any good gem out there?

Answer 1

This article explains how a sitemap can be generated and how you could let Google know of it.

Basically should should create a controller which finds all pages (eg your Posts) and put in into an XML file. Next you tell Google about the location of the XML file and when your website is updated.

A simpple Google rails sitemap query reveals lots of other articles explaining basically the same thing.

Answer 2

Here is a plugin for creating sitemaps in Ruby on Rails: Ruby on Rails sitemap plugin. It takes care of most of the sitemap logic and generation. The plugin is from my homepage.

Example configuration:

Sitemap::Map.draw do

  # default page size is 50.000 which is the specified maximum at http://sitemaps.org.
  per_page 10

  url root_url, :last_mod => DateTime.now, :change_freq => 'daily', :priority => 1

  new_page!

  Product.all.each do |product|
    url product_url(product), :last_mod => product.updated_at, :change_freq => 'monthly', :priority => 0.8
  end

  new_page!

  autogenerate  :products, :categories,
                :last_mod => :updated_at,
                :change_freq => 'monthly',
                :priority => 0.8

  new_page!

  autogenerate  :users,
                :last_mod => :updated_at,
                :change_freq => lambda { |user| user.very_active? ? 'weekly' : 'monthly' },
                :priority => 0.5

end

Best regards, Lasse