True, but it helps when one wants to check the sitemap if it's formatted. Now I have to format it, e.g. by using
www.freeformatter.com
to make it more readable.
JL-Sitemaps does a good job to create XML-sitemaps for articles on a multilingual website. It adds
hreflang tags and
image tags for the intro images.
There're two issues that I have to get in and correct manually: JL-Sitemap does not add the
hreflang tags of he homepage in the default language (English), which it does in the other language (Spanish). Therefore I have to add this manually.
This is what this part of the code looks like after the XML-code has been formatted, but before my changes:
<url>
<loc>https://my-site.com/en/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://my-site.com/es/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="https://my-site.com/es/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
</url>
Furthermore, the
hreflang are set to language and country specific variables for the two languages. This create a warning when validating the sitemap, because it's expected that
x-default should not be country specific. Therefore I have to replace
en-GB with
en.
This is what the same code look like after my changes:
<url>
<loc>https://my-site.com/en/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="https://my-site.com/es/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://my-site.com/es/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="https://my-site.com/es/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://my-site.com/en/" />
</url>
It would be handy if the XML-sitemap would be formatted to start with.
The Kunena extension does not work equal well on a multilingual website. It might partly depend on the fact that Kunena isn't really developed for multilingual websites, but by having one section each for English and Spanish, then it works fairly well. The problem is that the sitemap created by JL-Sitemaps even put the treads in the Spanish section in the English language version. Therefore, I have to correct it manually.
Overall JL-Sitemaps does a good job and it's an advantage that static sitemaps are generated, because then one can make manual corrections of the sitemap manually if needed.
