Creating a sitemap

[franzpeter]

Has anyone else tried out that tool for creating site maps too: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/structure-a-navigation/site-map/24063? For me it works like a charm in case of VM categories. For big shops with a lot of products, it creates a site map dynamically, but giving the link to a crawler, I receive the report that a timeout occurred while accessing the server. For smaller shops it works with products too. It even allows to create image site map or news site map (XML or html. For bigger shops if the timeout problem occurs, it is possible to download the site map file and manually send it to crawlers. A missing feature is, in that case, that it does not create sitemap files on the server. Download and re-upload is not very comfortable, even if the downloaded file is with .zip.
But it is a nice tool, because it offers some flexibility. I can create for example a product site map, a category site map or a manufacturer site map. It is not very complicate but a little bit more difficult than some other for me not working solutions. Every sitemap needs a Data source and therefore the SQL database informations. It sounds more complicate than it is, because you just need to select the component from a drop down (here it is: virtuemart) and the language table (dropdown) for the site map content you wish to use. For products it is for example to choose the virtuemart_products_en_gb table from the drop down and the virtuemart_product_id from the next dropdown field. Enter the view in the component view field, for example productdetails (or if it is category: category). Click on save and the Sitemap component has already created a select query.
What I like with the component is, that it is very flexible. If there is need for a site map from another component, no problem. Choosing the component and the tables (simply with a drop down menu) will create sitemaps for other components too. There are nice tooltips inside sitemap component, so configuration should not be a problem.

[PRO]

i use this for product sitemap
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=104612.0

You could also create a template with csvi with replacement etc. that would make it easier