Automatic Sitemap Submission - New module that would benefit from feedback

[FireWire 78]

Hey everyone-

We recently had a need come up for a website. After launching our website the company hired an SEO specialist who is doing some significant work revising and optimizing content. To help enhance this process I wrote a very simple module that automatically submits the website's sitemap.xml file to Bing and Google when a page is published, or when a page is saved that was already published.

As for our reasoning- there's a lot of information available as to why submitting your sitemap regularly can be beneficial. In classic Google style their official documentation says that there "is no guarantee" that submitting a sitemap alone will trigger a re-indexing by Google's bots. That said, devs have done tests where there is a strong coincidence between a sitemap submission and activity by Google bots on that website. Google has stated that there is no limit or cap on the number of times you can submit a sitemap so there is no penalty for triggering this for every change. For more details and the hard science visit this excellent article https://trevorfox.com/2018/09/ping-sitemaps-search-engines/

This module does the following:

• Hooks into save/publish
• Checks that the sitemap.xml URL is valid and a sitemap is available. This is done through a cURL request instead of file checking to account for plugins such as MarkupSitemapXML that generate the sitemap dynamically on demand.
• Submits sitemap ping to Google and Bing
• Logs activity
• Shows a warning if the sitemap was not submitted after a page save/publish. Which could help a user notify the site developer if something isn't working.

My primary question is quality of code and using hooks correctly. I used two addHookAfter published and saved to trigger pings in the init() function. Is there a better way to hook into multiple events or is defining the hooks separately the way to go? I haven't created a lot of modules and wanted to give the community a chance to critique it before considering adding it to the module directory.

Source is located at: https://github.com/skylundy/ProcessAutoSitemapSubmit

Thanks for any feedback or critique!

[flydev 👊🏻 1,836]

Just to let you know that the idea is brillant and your module come in handy. I am sure we will have some feedback and pull-requests in the next weeks. To give some more visibility to the module, you could show us how/why to use it in conjunction with the others SEO modules existing here.

Thanks again mate 🙂 👏

[FireWire 78]

9 hours ago, flydev said:

Just to let you know that the idea is brillant and your module come in handy. I am sure we will have some feedback and pull-requests in the next weeks. To give some more visibility to the module, you could show us how/why to use it in conjunction with the others SEO modules existing here.

Thanks again mate 🙂 👏

That's a great idea. I'm going to add some information to the configuration screen with recommendations and information on that as well.

Would this benefit from creating a post in the Modules/Plugins forum since this one is in the Module/Plugin Development forum? I initially wanted to see if there's any critiques or feedback that showed it wasn't ready for primetime but I think it is.