Rapls Sitemap

Description

Rapls Sitemap builds the “table of contents” page your visitors use to find things — your pages in their real hierarchy, your posts under their categories, and as much or as little else as you choose. Drop in the [rapls_sitemap] shortcode or the Sitemap block, and the page keeps rebuilding itself as the site grows.

This is a human-facing sitemap, not the XML sitemap search engines read. WordPress produces that itself at wp-sitemap.xml, and this plugin stays out of its way.

It is a maintained replacement for PS Auto Sitemap (closed in 2022) and WP Sitemap Page, written from scratch. Both plugins’ documented interfaces are reproduced, so an existing sitemap page keeps working without editing its content.

Why site owners pick Rapls Sitemap

• One placement, the whole page. Pages, posts, categories, authors and date archives, one after another under their own headings, from a single shortcode.
• Simple to start, deep when you need it. The settings screen opens on a Basic tab holding the eight decisions a sitemap cannot be built without. The rest is one tab away, in panels that open themselves when they hold anything but a default.
• A truncated list says so. Where the entry cap cuts a list short, the output says it was cut.
• Built for large sites. One query per post type, a cap on all three queries, and a render cache that clears itself on content changes.
• No front-end credit link, and no dashboard advertising.

What it lists

• Pages in their parent/child hierarchy, to any depth you choose.
• Posts, optionally grouped under their categories, with child categories nested.
• Categories, tags and taxonomies, with or without the entries under them.
• Authors, filtered by user ID and role, and date archives by year and month.
• Navigation menus, with # placeholder items printed as headings rather than dead links.
• Custom post types and taxonomies, as long as they are viewable on the front end. One that is not publicly queryable is never listed, whatever asks for it, because its pages would 404.

Choosing what appears

• Depth limit, and a “list only what is under this page” scope, which a shortcode can resolve to the current page or the one above.
• Exclude posts, categories or users by ID, or whole post types and taxonomies. Excluding a parent takes its children with it.
• Leave out the sitemap’s own page, password-protected entries, and entries individually marked noindex.
• Limit by publication date, for a sitemap of one school year. A category holding nothing from that year drops out with it.
• Entry caps: per list, per category, and a starting offset.

Ordering and design

• Entries by date, title, ID, menu order, last modified, comment count, at random, or by a custom field — which is how you get a true kana order for Japanese titles. Category headings by name, count, slug or ID.
• 27 CSS presets plus “no styling at all”, for themes that would rather do it themselves.
• A five-step text size slider on the Basic tab, for the one appearance question every site has.
• Font size, line height, indent, link colour, underline and column count on top of the preset; an exact font size overrules the slider.
• Bullets as discs, circles, squares, emoji, or an icon class such as Font Awesome, separately for top-level and nested items.
• Section and category labels as real h2–h6 headings, which screen-reader users navigate by.
• A class reference on the settings screen, so you can target the markup from the Customizer’s Additional CSS or your theme.

Migrating from PS Auto Sitemap or WP Sitemap Page

You can switch without editing the content of your sitemap page. None of either plugin’s code is used here, only their documented interfaces. Both options are off by default, because answering to another plugin’s markup unasked is a surprise.

• From WP Sitemap Page — recognises [wp_sitemap_page] and its only values. The shortcode is not claimed while WP Sitemap Page itself is active, so the two cannot fight over it.
• From PS Auto Sitemap — recognises the <!-- SITEMAP CONTENT REPLACE POINT --> comment left in page content, and its stored settings can be read in with one button. They are read, never written.

noindex integrations

Entries individually marked noindex can be left out, reading these with no setup: Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEO SIMPLE PACK, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, All in One SEO and the Cocoon theme. Categories, tags and authors are read too, where the term or author is what is listed.

A default applying to a whole post type, taxonomy or archive is not read. Those listings appear only because you chose them, and an SEO plugin’s default — Yoast noindexes date archives out of the box — would otherwise empty a list you asked for.

A password-protected entry never contributes an excerpt, whether or not it stays in the list. Its text is not for everybody, and this output is cached and shared.

Extending it

Developer filters cover what the settings cannot reach, including rapls_sitemap/query_args, which hands you the query for one post type before it runs. Worked examples are on the plugin page.

Multilingual

WPML and Polylang work with no configuration. Both narrow the post and term queries to the current language, and this plugin does not switch those filters off. The render cache keys on the locale, so one language is never served another’s.

Learn more: Plugin details and developer reference | Source code (GitHub)