XML Sitemaps Meeting: March 3rd, 2020

Another week passed by with quite a productive meeting for the XML Sitemaps feature project. Here’s a short summary, as well as the agenda for today’s meeting.

Meeting Recap: February 25th

In case you missed it, I recommend checking out last week’s post with everything that happened so far:

As planned, we went over some of the existing issues, but we also discussed some things that came up on short notice. Here’s the gist:

• We reiterated on the idea to remove the lastmod field. @swissspidy offered to start a PR that explores this so it can actually be tested in the wild. @joemcgill offered to post some stats about the performance of this last modified date calculation.
• There was a discussion, also after the meeting, about changing URLs to have a /wp- prefix and whether that prefix should be filterable. The consensus was that a filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. is unnecessary. A new PR was added to implement this.
  @kraftbj offered his help to implement automatic redirects from /sitemap.xml to /wp-sitemap.xml for improved discoverability.
• Next up was the SimpleXML dependency and how the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party should behave when that PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 5.6.20 or higher extension is missing.
  We tend towards just disabling sitemaps if that’s the case, but perhaps provide some messaging about it.
  @kraftbj offered to try to get some stats about the availability of SimpleXML via Jetpack, as well as to help with a PR.
  @pbiron reached out on the hosting community channel, and is looking for specific questions that we could ask in a make/hosting post.
• Last but not least, there was an open question about leveraging the REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/. for sitemaps. It was not fully clear though how that would be beneficial. As of now, there are no plans to explore this.

Agenda: March 3rd

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 3 at 16.00 CET

• Updates since last week
  • New PRs needing reviews:
    • Filterable queries
    • Plugin activation and deactivation hooks
    • Unfilterable wp- URL prefix
    • Disabling sitemaps on private sites
  • Good first issues:
    • Removing trailing slash
• SimpleXML dependency and fallback handling
• Open floor
• Release planning

This meeting is held in the #core-sitemaps channel , to join the meeting, you’ll need an account on the Making WordPress Slack.

#agenda, #feature-plugins, #feature-projects, #sitemaps, #xml-sitemaps