A new major version is out and ready to be installed! It’s a somewhat big update what I’m releasing today, with some new features and a lot of improvements — mostly in terms of performance.

The plugin no longer relies on the WordPress functions (template tags) to generate the sitemap but on its own optimised methods instead. That let me improve the whole code written around the database queries, reducing the server resources usage and making it to run faster.

As you’ll notice, the setting to exclude pages is gone. Now you can exclude pages directly from the New/Edit screen — much more efficient. If you set some exceptions, you don’t need to manually reassign them to each page, the plugin will automatically upgrade your settings when first launched.

Another functionality that has been refreshed is the grouping of posts by category: if a post belongs to more than one category, it’s now listed under the parent category that comes first in alphabetical order.

Google Sitemap — This is a feature I’m currently working on and it will get deep changes with the next releases. The implementation that comes with this version is a first beta I have tested for over 15 days with both Google and Bing, so don’t worry to use it right now on your website. Let me know on the support forum if you experience any issues.

Complete List of Changes

• Dropped backward compatibility with versions of WordPress older than 3.3
• New: multisite support.
• New: virtual XML Sitemap with XSLT template.
• New: order tags by name or most used.
• New: order categories by name or most used.
• New: order authors by name or published posts.
• New: exclude posts and pages from within the “New/Edit” screen.
• New: added an “Overview” tab to the settings page where you’ll find useful information about the build process.
• New: the last build date and the scheduled rebuild date are displayed in the settings page.
• New: added a button to manually rebuild the sitemap.
• Updated POT file.
• Update: removed all the CSS classes (auto-generated by WordPress) from the lists of pages and categories.
• Update: exclude pages directly from within the “New/Edit Page” screen.
• Update: removed the setting to hide/show the subcategories from the list of posts.
• Update: modified the behaviour of the functionality “group posts by category”.
• Update: the posts count in the list of tags is displayed only if greater than one.
• Update: modified the title attribute applied to the <a> tags generated in the lists of tags and categories.
• Update: removed the “Exclude Pages” setting from the settings page.
• Enhancement: the generator engine has been completely rewritten.
• Enhancement: the generated code (both HTML5 and XML) is cleaner and minified.
• Enhancement: improved error handling.
• Enhancement (Dev): if needed, the plugin tries to rise the memory allocation limit while the rebuilding process is running.
• Enhancement (Dev): the detection of the “sitemap page” is performed much earlier than any action hook useful to run custom queries is triggered. This prevents unwanted behaviours that could take place in secondary or custom loops executed in template files or by other plugins.
• Enhancement: improved the scheduling of the rebuild process.
• Enhancement: improved object caching.
• Enhancement: added a title attribute to the <a> tags generated in the list of pages.
• Fixed some security issues related to the sanitisation of the sitemap.
• Fix: duplicated entries were added in the list of posts when they were grouped by category.
• Fix: the static page set as front page was not excluded from the list of pages.
• Fix: no default CSS were printed in the head of the webpage if the “Powered by” notice was display but the advanced settings were not saved.
• Fix: a few bugs with the cron job caused an unwanted delay on the execution of the rebuild process.
• Fix (Dev): missed to set the global $super_cache_enabled before the call to wp_cache_post_change().
• Minor fixes and enhancements.