I understand that the sitemap submit to search engine need to link content & menu to them to be sure that they are scrubbing everything.

However this is completely different when you want to present un concise sitemap to visitors of your web site.

That site map should show a clear diagram with links to all the important part of your site. You don’t want necessary (as example) to present hundred and hundred of article in a blog and you want this diagram to be comprehensive in it’s presentation.

So far using relatively basic settings of JSitemap I end up with the menu map on one side and (with the Content datasource) a repetition of that menu in separated elements that present all their contents. the result is a messy double entries of the same menus showing different type of links/elements that obviously will become really confusing for my visitors.

Maybe I don't understand how to use this component yet, but so far, I’m a little worry of the results.

Probably really effective for SEO but really counterproductive as a Sitemap for visitors where the goal is to find everything or the most important section/information in your site in a clear diagram?

Hi again Patrick,

this aspect varies site by site. For this reason the content data source can be disabled from the HTML sitemap presented to users leaving only a quick navigation menu.

There is also another option, with an effect that must be evaluated based on the way that menu are built.
You can merge the content data source elements with the one of the menu, if not using the mindmap layout, to build a unique tree.

In the screenshot below i highlighted the 2 parameters to accomplish what i said above.

There is also another option, if you want to differentiate the elements included in the content data source for HTML from the XML one, you can create a copy of the content source and exclude categories, articles etc.

The elements included in the HTML sitemap can be configured in different ways.

PS: i'm not sure if i asked you to contact me by email, but i think so. Please contact me by email for further questions.

Are you sure you prefer by email. I was thinking that it’s always cool for a developer to build a good forum that are more useful to your community that personal email ?

Thank’s for your answer and I will continue by email if you prefer?

Ok, I start to understand, I think… Tell me the following make sense.

We have 2 basic data source — Content and Menu sources
This 2 sources are use to build:
— The HTML output is used for the front of the site
— The XML output are used by Search engine

In a normal case whatever you set in those 2 data sources will automatically reflect in the HTML/XML output
— They will both the same
Question here — Do you have a way to further customization of the XML ?

Also, as you said you can duplicate the Content source to differentiate what will end up in the HTML from the XML.
Question here — Can you risk to have double entries doing this ?
— And do you see a value to do the same with the Menu source (with the same problems) ?

Just test your “Merge with the menu tree” pretty cool, thanks.

The only two things that I don't like is:
1— You cannot Name that tree (like the menu tree), it will be great to be able to name it e.g “Articles” or “Content” to further clarify for the Viewer what exactly they are looking at.

2— You should have the possibility to keep the folder close for the Content source and the same choice (close/open) for the menu tree. I said this because, this “Merge” option will not look good open in most of case as you can have hundreds of articles in the content source. It is rare that menu have many elements.

In my case, it will not work for that reason, because many articles will be added to the site and will make an really long (to long) Content tree because I have no way to choose keep the Menu tree open and the content tree close because the setting are situated in the General configuration.

Being you posting a lot of questions all together i've difficulties to answer all and it's easier for me using email.

By default HTML/XML are the same, you can customize both contents using a duplicated data source for 'content' type if needed. Double entries in XML are not possible because doubles are discarded automatically. Also you can choose to include one data source only in HTMl and another data source only in XML. Menu data sources can't be duplicated, they are synced automatically to Joomla menus and are reflected the same in HTML/XML.

Folders can't be named, folders name are generated automatically based on the category/article name... otherwise why use a sitemap generator?
What can be done is add a new parameter in the next release to override the close/open state of the menu tree for each data source. This will work in your specific case.