Adding Module pages to your Magento Sitemap

In earlier Magento versions it wasn’t possible to add additionals entries to your Magento Sitemap without overriding or extending Mage_Sitemap_Model_Sitemap.

Luckily, with the introduction of two events, sitemap_categories_generating_before & sitemap_products_generating_before, this became possible and therefore way simpler, too. Unless you don’t have to extend Mage_Sitemap_Model_Sitemap anyway, for example because you want to add images to your sitemap, you rather want to use these events.

Good to know…

Which event you want to choose depends on the changefreq and priority values you’d prefer for your additional page entries. You can look them up or change them in your Magento Sitemap configurations under System > Configuration > Catalog > Google Sitemap.

Even tho Magento is adding entries for category-, product- and CMS-pages, it does not fire an event for the latter one. Hence you have to choose between your category & product sitemap values.

In our example we prefer the product sitemap values. Therefore we go with the event sitemap_products_generating_before.

To it then!

Lets assume our custom module creates dynamic “News” pages and stores the page information, including the page URLs, within our model database table.

So first we add an event listener to the <global> tag in our module’s config.xml:

    <events>
        <sitemap_products_generating_before>
            <observers>
                <{your_unique_event_observer_name}>
                    <class>{Brand}_{Module}_Model_Observer</class>
                    <method>addPagesToSitemap</method>
                </{your_unique_event_observer_name}>
            </observers>
        </sitemap_products_generating_before>
    </events>

Then, in our module’s Observer, we let the method addPagesToSitemap add extra items to the product collection:

<?php
class {Brand}_{Module}_Model_Observer
{   
    function addPagesToSitemap(Varien_Event_Observer $observer){

        $sitemapItems = $observer->getEvent()->getCollection()->getItems();

        // Get your module's page collection including their urls
        // Adjust the following lines to your needs
        $collection = Mage::getModel('{brand}_{module}/pages')->getCollection()
            ->addFieldToSelect(array('page_id','url'))
            ->addFieldToFilter('display', 1);
        // My module stores the page path separately,
        // you might don't need this:
        $modulePagePath = Mage::helper('{my-modules-helper}')->getNewsPath();

        foreach($collection as $_item){
            $varienObject = new Varien_Object();
            // We don't want to override 
            // any existing product/category items
            $uniqueId = '{module}'.$_item->getPageId();         
            $varienObject->setId($uniqueId);

            // You might want to adjust this if your item
            // stores the complete url. Don't add the base url tho,
            // Mage_Sitemap_Model_Sitemap::generateXml adds it
            $varienObject->setUrl($modulePagePath . DS . $_item->getUrl());

            $sitemapItems[$uniqueId] = $varienObject;
        }
        $observer->getEvent()->getCollection()->setItems($sitemapItems);

        return $this;
    }
}

Well and that’s it! You can test it by manually generating your Magento Sitemap under Catalog > Google Sitemap.

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(Tested in Magento 1.9.2.2)