Hi all,
I've been having issues with the Sitemap and I don't know if anyone can help. I hope so, because I'm going through a merge and am trying to put together proof that Flare is the tool we should use - if I can't get a sitemap (or another solution) to work, it will be a big strike against Flare.
The situation is that the company we merged with has an interal search tool that allows staff to search any number of things - client IDs to access their platform, help topics, staff, etc. Admittedly, it doesn't search everything (Jira, Confluence, the mountain of documents on Google Drive), but the fact that I can't get my HTML5 help integrated is a bit of a pain. I was told that if I could provide a sitemap with a full map of topics, that would be fine. Easy enough, I thought...
So, here are the issues I've encountered
1. I'm not sure how to get the sitemap to work when you have more than one language in the output - it only shows urls without the language tag. I've tried adding hreflang code to the sitemap, but coding is not my expertise so I haven't got this to work.
2. Because I'm looking at integrating Flare for a small team, I thought I would look at Central. I was told that an XML sitemap is not supported in Central, but I thought I would see if I could try another way and in my test build in my test Central I used an online sitemap builder and was able to get a sitemap. I tried saving this to the project in the same location it would have been saved if generated by Flare itself, but when I build the output and set it to live, the sitemap can't be found...
If Central doesn't support this, I could look at using Git to manage our projects but then I'd still need to solve problem #1 with the languages...
Does anyone have any experience with this?
Thanks for your help,
Amy
Sitemap
Re: Sitemap
(1) Flare can't produce a multi-language sitemaps with hreflang links to alternative URLs.
I had the same issue, and I modified the sitemap produced by Flare using a 3rd party tool (FAR HTML), which can be used for complicated find and replace jobs. I searched for the link in the <loc> tag, then used that to build the extra <xhtml:link> tags (including the hreflang) for each language. I could do this with our help because the only difference in the URLs for each language was a folder in the path, e.g. "\en-gb\Content\TopicX.htm", "\fr-fr\Content\TopicX.htm". Whilst I used FAR, if you know regular expressions (regex) you could do the exactly the same sort of search and replace job.
(2) I don't use Central, but what exactly is "not supported" with sitemaps in Central? (A search of Central's help gives zero results for "sitemap".) I'd assume that Flare can still generate a a sitemap for a target that you build, regardless of whether your project is connected to Central or not. So is the issue that you can't submit the sitemap to Google if your output is being published and hosted on MadCap's own servers? (just a wild guess there)
I had the same issue, and I modified the sitemap produced by Flare using a 3rd party tool (FAR HTML), which can be used for complicated find and replace jobs. I searched for the link in the <loc> tag, then used that to build the extra <xhtml:link> tags (including the hreflang) for each language. I could do this with our help because the only difference in the URLs for each language was a folder in the path, e.g. "\en-gb\Content\TopicX.htm", "\fr-fr\Content\TopicX.htm". Whilst I used FAR, if you know regular expressions (regex) you could do the exactly the same sort of search and replace job.
(2) I don't use Central, but what exactly is "not supported" with sitemaps in Central? (A search of Central's help gives zero results for "sitemap".) I'd assume that Flare can still generate a a sitemap for a target that you build, regardless of whether your project is connected to Central or not. So is the issue that you can't submit the sitemap to Google if your output is being published and hosted on MadCap's own servers? (just a wild guess there)
Re: Sitemap
Thanks for your reply Dave.
I think I've managed to figure out a solution - a bit of a workaround, but it hopefully will work for what we need it for. Frustratingly, it has nothing to do with Google - it's just needed for an internal search tool within the company (on a sort of intranet dashboard).
I'm doing a trial of Central and the solution I've found works, so yay for that. I'd asked the question to sales about getting a sitemap and was told it wasn't supported - maybe answer was just for the traditional Flare method of generating a sitemap through the target.
I guess all I needed was a weekend and coming at it with a fresh mind on a Monday morning. I'll keep your solution in mind in case mine breaks in the future or I find out there's something about it that doesn't fit with what we need.
Thanks again,
I think I've managed to figure out a solution - a bit of a workaround, but it hopefully will work for what we need it for. Frustratingly, it has nothing to do with Google - it's just needed for an internal search tool within the company (on a sort of intranet dashboard).
I'm doing a trial of Central and the solution I've found works, so yay for that. I'd asked the question to sales about getting a sitemap and was told it wasn't supported - maybe answer was just for the traditional Flare method of generating a sitemap through the target.
I guess all I needed was a weekend and coming at it with a fresh mind on a Monday morning. I'll keep your solution in mind in case mine breaks in the future or I find out there's something about it that doesn't fit with what we need.
Thanks again,