I administer 4 different church websites, all of which I have used your amazing component on. It has been a true blessing to have such a comprehensive and easy way of managing sermon and study media!

One beneficial feature that I believe would really help take our websites to a new level of search-ability would be to have better Site-Map support.
I suspect that as google crawls our sites, it eventually discovers our studies... but I have seen the power of well structured site maps and the favor that Google shows toward such features.

XMaps is an already established component that handles this well and already sports hundreds of plugins that add support for other components. Maybe a plugin for XMaps would be best. I already have my XMaps generated files submitted to sites such as Google Webmaster Tools and this would be a seamless expansion of those where all the sitemap admin would continue to occur easily within our CMS.

Another way, though slightly less favored by Google, is if JBS could generate an XML file that would provide a link to every study. The XML file would then be submitted as a separate site map to sites such as Google Webmaster Tools.
This, while not my personal preference, could also be used to send an RSS feed

My gifts are in graphic design and preaching... sadly my coding ability has lots of opportunity for improvement, otherwise I would try and help contribute to this feature.

Hey Brian,

So this is a great idea. I looked at the code for 1.5 versions of XMap plugins for specific extensions - hopefully they haven't changed it much for their 1.6/7 version. I think it would be relatively easy to create such a plugin.

In the meantime - when you create a podcast and write the podcast file you are essentially creating an RSS feed that could be submitted to Google.

Tom

I do have the mp3 xml's and on some sites, the PDF XML's submitted to google... though when it comes to the content that I populate each study with, we're missing out.
Thank you so much for all your hard work and passion for this component. I really am pumped to see this plugin happen!
You're truly doing the kingdom's work with your talents!

So what sorts of information would you envision in a biblestudy Xmap plugin?

I am assuming that the link would be to a studydetails view.

Here's an example of a link Xmap created to a stock content item:



Looks like maybe an alias "fruit-shop" is included. If it's a link, the only things really needed are like this:



The "t" is the template to use which would be a parameter.

I've managed to get a plugin to install under Joomla 1.7, JBS 7.0.1 and Xmap 2.0 - though it is nearly completely undocumented how to do it.

The very basic concept, and all that I'd be interested in, would be that it would point to every published bible study's studydetails page (where date, speaker, scripture, topic, content, etc... are displayed). It would also be good to include every published media file, so that google could have direct access to any PDF, Word, Video or Audio file that is managed.
This would ensure that any and all content contained within JBS would be populated into the sitemap.

(If you were to include every media file, it would probably be redundant to have it populate with the podcast files too... unless there would be an advantage I'm unaware of in letting google know of an xml podcast file.)

We are also working on meta data and meta keywords. The is also a big posh for a new font end which will incloud better integration with the Xmap plugin sceem. I'll work with Tom on one. We should have the plugin don shortly and added to the installer.