OddThinking

After a post about the race for WordPress plugins for Google Sitemaps, and a post about why Google Sitemaps would would be beneficial, I’ve noted that the appropriate Google search has risen from zero entries to 161 in the two days since Google made the announcement.

I went through the search results to review the contenders, and find the race winner.

Judging Critera

I have pretty much made these criteria up as I went along, but they seem fair.

Criterion #1:

It must support your WordPress Home page, Single Posts, Category pages, Author pages, Date pages and (static) Pages.

Rationale: Many sites, including some of mine, have more than just posts in them. It needs to support the whole (customer-visible) web-site.

Criterion #2:

It should be possible to set the priority (and/or it should default) to Pages > Single Posts > Home page >= Category/Author/Date pages.

Rationale: I have already described the benefits of this priority system.

Criterion #3:

It must meet the “essential requirements of a WordPress plugin”.

Rationale: Is that really important? I think so – it makes it available to a far greater range of people, and it means it won’t get lost when you reinstall/upgrade your blog. As I have already done this a few times, I consider this to be very important.

Criterion #4: For bonus points, the plugin should assist you in registering your site with Google.

Rationale: This isn’t important because it only needs to be done once, and it may be a bit tricky, because it needs to get your Google account details to achieve it, but I think it would be very helpful to new users.

Results

Winner by default: Social Patterns

It looks like Michael Nguyen at Social Patterns is the winner for getting the fastest solution out there. A number of people are linking to him, and he is getting the fast-growing blog-fame he deserves.

At this time, despite all the Google matches, his is the only real solution being offered. Unfortunately, his solution is very limited.

He only supports your home page and single posts only, so he only partly passes Criterion #1.

He sets all the priority of your Home Page to 1.0, and the single posts to 0.8, so he fails the strict interpretation of Criterion #2.

That said, he sets the Change Frequency of the Home Page to Always, and the Change Frequency of the other pages to Daily. (I would probably have chosen weekly or monthly – even better it should start Daily, and slowly degrade to weekly, monthly and yearly as the last-modified date gets stale!) As a result, it may well get handled correctly by Google – that remains to be seen. I will give him a pass-mark for this.

The code he provides is just PHP code you need to copy into a filename of your choice, so it fails Criterion #3.

He provides some steps for how to register with Google, so I will give him half of the bonus points.

Almost winners

I came across the following contenders in my search, but they were disqualified because they weren’t targeted at WordPress, but instead targeted one of the competitors.

• Compooter.org – built on top of Michael Nguyen’s efforts, this is for TextPattern. He does have an interesting security tip for prevent people who aren’t Google from seeing your sitemap. Not sure why it would be considered a security hole.
• LightPress is a replacement for the front-end of WordPress. They have a Google Sitemap Support Plugin.
• Niall Kennedy has a plugin for Movable Type

Well done, Mr Nguyen. However, the judge is going to sit tight for another week or so, to see if more contenders appear, and a more complete solution is produced that passes more of my criteria.