I been hearing some success stories from people using PHPBB and in particular the php method of site maps, i had not heard of php site maps before, and was hoping someone could pass on some knowledge. thanks
Those aren't really sitemaps as much as a HTML page with links to all forums and important pages. Real sitemaps are in .xml format although submiting the .php sitemap might give you errors in google.
There is no difference if sitemap is generated in PHP, Python of C++. Sitemap is just a tiny (comparing to all website) XML file that contains list of pages, their priorities, last modification date and information about how often the page is updated. It helps to the search engines to understand which pages should be indexed at first and if you choose better pages than Google automatically did it before then, yes, you may have a success story.
Yes, you can create a sitemap in php, and yes it has to be in xml format. Just because something is in xml format doesn't necessarily mean it has to have a filename with the extension of .xml. Here's an example of one of mine: (note: site is not work or family safe if you try and pull up the site itself) www dot neud.org / sitemap.php Notice how everything that is output is xml? What happens is that my php script goes out to the database and creates a recordset of all of the possible page combinations. Then it loops through and echos them as output so that google or yahoo or bing or whomever can parse through them in the format they understand. Hope this helps. (apparently I haven't been here long enough to post links yet, so if I need to remove that part from the post I can... just trying to be helpful. )
We submit site maps to google or search engines so that they can understand most of our web pages. PHP just helps to find all pages of our website and embed them in sitemap format or xml page. These helps Google to crawl all the web pages.
Not sure that there is one, being that every website is different. If you're using a pre-built package like Wordpress or Joomla or something, they typically create the sitemaps for you already. It's only when you're really custom writing your site like I do that you need to create a sitemap.
I don't think you get the point. All sitemaps have to be in XML. The only difference is that with PHP, the XML is generated dynamically each time the sitemap is requested instead of just residing in an already generated file in the directory.
again you are mixing concepts, php site maps are for users. Xml Sitemaps are for Search Engines only!!!