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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 filter 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 plugin should behave when that PHP 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 API for sitemaps. It was not fully clear though how that would be beneficial. As of now, there are no plans to explore this.
