Really Simple Sitemap Plugin – Tips

I’ve just installed and activated the Really Simple Sitemap plugin on a WordPress (vn. 2.8.6) site hosted on my local server. I encountered a couple of ‘potholes’ before getting the sitemap to display, and then styled to fit my theme. So here’s a step-by-step for beginner developers (using customised WordPress themes) like myself:

1. Install and activate the Really Simple Sitemap plugin in WordPress
2. To choose your settings for the plugin, go to ‘Settings > RS Sitemap’ on the WordPress dashboard.
3. Create a new page from the dashboard of WordPress. Give it an approprite title, e.g. Site Map.
4. Click on the ‘HTML’ tab of the content box (top right), as opposed to ‘Visual’. Between the ‘code’ tags, enter ‘<!–rs sitemap–>’. Note that this differs from the code supplied with the plugin, ‘<!–rs-sitemap–>’
5. Select a template for the page, if appropriate. I created a ‘bare bones’ template based on my index.php file, featuring the_title() and the_content(). The site map links will display in the_content().
6. Publish the page(!) and make a note of the page id
7. Create your Site Map link (mine is in the footer.php file) and reference the WordPress page you’ve just created, i.e. a href=”<?php echo get_page_link(’85’); ?>”
8. Check the site map link in your browser – it should take you to your new Site Map page and all associated links.
9. Now to style the site map links: open style.css and add ‘code a {font:xxx; font-size:xxx; color:xxx; etc}’ to the stylesheet. Obviously, style the links to suit your particular theme.
10. Refresh the Site Map page in your browser, and you should see the style changes take effect.

I hope these notes are of some help. No doubt I’ll be referring back to them myself!

(I’ll supply an example of my sitemap as soon as it’s uploaded to the Internet.)