WPML Strictly Google Sitemap

Hi diver66

Thanks for your comment about my plugin. I only got stuck into PHP and WordPress this year having been a .NET coder for years so I am pretty new at the plugin / wordpress dev game so its good to hear from someone who thinks my plugin is good ??

As for the WPML plugin I hadn’t heard of it before and so I am unaware of its benefits in terms of SEO however I have played around with auto translation tools and I know the benefits of creating versions per language.

It all depends on how the translation is carried out and whether new versions of the content are saved and created or whether like Googles own “translate” toolbar or BabelFish like tools the translation is done on the fly using an AJAX API.

If each page is translated on the fly using AJAX API’s such as BING or Google then I am guessing that the URL of each page will remain the same so there is nothing requiring a change in terms of sitemap content. If however each translated page is given a new page name then there would be some benefit in adding each page to the sitemap as the SERP’s won’t treat it as duplicate content.

More details are required.

Strictly,

WPML is not an auto-translate tool, but one where authors can manually enter multiple posts in multiple languages. They appear as separate posts/pages in the WordPress database.

It’s a very well-designed plugin. Basically WPML adds filters so that functions like wp_list_pages only return pages in the currently selected language, and get_permalink returns the correct URL for the currently selected language.

The problem with Sitemap plugins is that because of these filters, they only generate for the default language, and not for any alternate language.

Adapting your plugin would mean getting the list of languages (there’s a function for that), and looping through the languages using your normal code for each language. The only difficulty I could anticipate would be persuading WPML to give you the posts for one language when running as a user using another language. I think you’d probably have to access the tables directly instead of using functions like wp_list_pages, but I’m not sure.

If you have specific questions, please ask.

Hi Mark

If the user enters multiple posts or pages in each language that have their own URL’s wouldn’t that create multiple records in the wp_posts table e.g one record for each language?

If that is the case and there are multiple records in that table then this plugin should work without requiring any changes.

I have tried to avoid wordpress functions for obtaining my data as I found from examining the other sitemap plugins who do rely on such methods as wp_list_pages that the performance bottlenecks come around due to lots of wordpress function calls being called multiple times that could only be called once.

Therefore I access the underlying tables directly to obtain lists of pages and posts. Check out my plugin homepage for more details > https://www.strictly-software.com/plugins/strictly-google-sitemap

Without knowing more about how this WPML plugin saves its data in the wordpress database I won’t know if any work needs to be done or not. Have you actually tried my sitemap plugin with WPML already?

If the user enters multiple posts or pages in each language that have their own URL’s wouldn’t that create multiple records in the wp_posts table e.g one record for each language?

Yes, it does.

Without knowing more about how this WPML plugin saves its data in the wordpress database I won’t know if any work needs to be done or not.

Because there are multiple records in the wp_posts table, it shouldn’t require too much work. I haven’t looked at your code yet, but I’m happy to do so if you would consider implementing small fixes. I’ve modified several plugins for WPML compatibility so I have some experience. If you’re using get_permalink for each of the page_id’s, it should work without too much trouble.

Have you actually tried my sitemap plugin with WPML already?

Yes, and it doesn’t work. Here’s the link: https://www.emw.org.uk/sitemap.xml – test non-English links and you’ll get 404s. Even the English-language pages don’t generate the correct links (due to the sub-page structure), but they get there eventually via 302s.

Feel free to look at the source code and let me know if you manage to sort it out for your needs.

The only reason I created any of my plugins was to resolve issues with existing plugins and I don’t think I am using a single plugin on any of my sites that hasn’t been modified so I suppose that’s the whole point of giving your code away for free so that end users can make of it what they will.

The code that gets all the permalink structures is in a method called GetSitePermalinks() and this is only called once before any building. Each page, post or category will then have the appropriate parts used within permalink structures e.g %category% %id% replaced during the SQL construction.

The issue with 301 redirects should now be fixed and was due to posts not correctly taking into consideration the value for $wp_rewrite->use_trailing_slashes and therefore not having a trailing slash added (if the site specifies it). With a trailing slash added to all permalinks there shouldn’t be any redirects going on.

Well, all I can say is I’m waiting for that ?? It will be amazing!
Please, can you let me know when the plugin is ready for WPML?
Thanks.