Upgrading to Drush 9

Drush should be installed and updated through composer. There is no stable Drush 9 version yet, so the development version must be used. Updating to the development version of Drush 9 is a simple as typing:

$ composer require drush/drush:dev-master

Porting your Drush commands to Drush 9

Porting the commands is a semi-automatic process: There is a command that will generate the required files and class structure for you. To start the wizard, just type:

$ drush generate drush-command-file -l dev

Drush will ask you for the module's machine name and for the optional path to the legacy Drush command file (the one that has your commands, ending with .drush.inc). You will have to provide the absolute path.

drush.services.yml

This is the file your Drush command definition goes into. Do not use your module's regular services.yml as you might have done in Drush 8 or else you will confuse the legacy Drush which will lead to a PHP error like this:

Fatal error: Class 'Drush\Commands\DrushCommands' not found in MyModuleCommands.

Use the dedicated drush.services.yml file in your module's root directory instead.

The file should look like this:

The Simple XML Sitemap module was originally created by gbyte as a temporary replacement for the non-functioning Drupal 8 XML Sitemamp Module. After putting some more work into it however, we decided to keep using it in our D8 & D9 projects, as it is very lightweight, simple to use and most importandly, adheres to a newer XML sitemap standard.

The 2.x branch features most of the functionality of the heavier XML Sitemap module while also featuring hreflang and image XML sitemaps, which is a new Google standard for creating multilingual XML sitemaps that should improve SEO even more.

The 3.x branch adds a robust generation process that works with huge sites in limited environments. It also introduces the concept of sitemap variants which are instances of different sitemap types which in turn are made of sitemap and URL generators. This makes it possible to run several different sitemap types on one Drupal instance.

The 4.x branch is a rewrite with developers/integrators in mind and makes much greater use of Drupal's entity API dropping some of its very specific chaining API. On top of that, it features many code and UI improvements.

Here is the description from the module page:

Creating a duplicate of an entity

Creating a duplicate of an entity is easily done via the entity API method Entity::createDuplicate(). This is a convenient method if the goal is to clone an entity into a new entity, as all identifiers of the previous entity get unset when using this method.

Apparently there are still pretty common Drupal 8 theming tasks that cannot be accomplished with the great twig_tweak module. This by the way was me giving a plug to a great little module, which makes half of all your theme preprocess hooks unnecessary.

Update: Apparently there is a module like twig_tweak but with the ability to do the above. It is called bamboo_twig and its documentation can be found here - thanks to Luckhardt Labs for mentioning it. Mind you I have not tested it yet. There is a rather interesting issue in its queue about the lack of collaboration between the two module maintainers.

If you would like to get the URL from an image that is trapped inside of a media entity however, you can either extract it using the aforementioned preprocess function like so:

This is a technical description of the 3.x branch of the module. For the newer 4.x branch, see this article.

Simple XML sitemap 3.0 has been released

The third major version of simple_sitemap has been seven months in the making. The module has been rewritten from the ground up and now features a more reliable generation process, a significantly more versatile API and many new functionalities.

Major new features

Ability to create any type of sitemap via plugins

The 8.x-3.x release allows not only to customize the URL generation through URL generator plugins as 2.x did, but also creating custom sitemap types that mix and match a sitemap generator along with several URL generators to create any type of sitemap.

This 3-plugin system coupled with the new concept of sitemap variants makes it possible to run several types of sitemaps on a single Drupal instance. Now e.g a Google news sitemap can coexist with your hreflang sitemap.

A sitemap variant can but does not need to be coupled to entity types/bundles. When creating a sitemap generator, one can define where the content source is located and what to do with it upon sitemap generation/deletion.

Ability to create sitemap variants of various sitemap types via the UI

In 3.x links form a specific entity bundle can be indexed in a specific sitemap variant with its own URL. This means, that apart from /sitemap.xml, there can be e.g

This is a technical description of the 3.x branch of the module. For the newer 4.x branch, see this article.

Simple XML sitemap 3.1 has been released

The third major version of simple_sitemap has been long in the making bringing a more reliable generation process, a significantly more versatile API and many new functionalities. The first minor ugrade of the 3.x branch comes with views support and human readable sitemaps.

Major new features in 3.1

Views and views arguments support

Including view display URLs in the sitemap has been possible through adding these URLs as custom links in the UI (or via the API).

View variations created by view arguments however are tedious to include as one would have to include every version of the URL.

The integration of the simple_sitemap_views inside simple_sitemap 3.x makes it easily doable via the UI.

Thanks to @WalkingDexter for his tremendous work on this submodule!

Human-readable sitemaps with XSL stylesheets

Before:

Occasionally I find myself needing plugin-like functionality, where users/downstream can throw a class into a folder and expect it to work. My script is supposed to find and instantiate these plugins during runtime without keeping track of their existence.

In a regular Drupal module, one would usually use the plugin architecture, but that comes with its overhead of boilerplate code and may not be the solution for the simplest of use cases.

Many class finder libraries rely on get_declared_classes() which may not be helpful, as the classes in question may not have been declared yet.

If you are on a Drupal 8/9 installation and want to use components already available to you, the Symfony (file) Finder can be an alternative for finding classes in a given namespace.

Installing dependencies

Ouside of Drupal 8/9, you may need to require this library in your application:

Bing 410 Gone

Microsoft recently killed their search engine's public API responsible for accepting sitemap ping requests (those where you let search engines know your XML sitemap's content has changed). They did so completely unannounced leading to logs filling up and users unsurprisingly assuming their sitemap submitting code was somehow at fault. It wasn't.

It became apparent that this was a step for Microsoft towards switching to the IndexNow protocol instead.

IndexNow supplements XML sitemaps

With IndexNow you now can quickly notify all participating search engines (Bing, Yandex) about a change that happened on your page eliminating the need to wait for them to come and scan your sitemap. The benefits of this approach are

• Instant submission of changes including creating, deleting and updating of content
• An alleged greener approach to indexing content as sitemap scanning requests get deprioritized
• Only one search engine needs to be notified and it will notify the others for you

Still, this new approach is more of a supplement than a revolution:

Can I submit all URLs for my site?

Use IndexNow to submit only URLs having changed (added, updated, or deleted) recently, including all URLs if all URLs have been changed recently. Use sitemaps to inform search engines about all your URLs. Search engines will visit sitemaps every few days.

After six months of work I'm delighted to tag the first stable release of the 4.x branch of the (Not-so-) Simple XML Sitemap module.

The project is in a really good place right now. At the moment of writing, drupal.org reports it being actively used on around 90k of Drupal 8/9 websites while having 0 open bug reports. This either means you people are lousy bug reporters, or we are doing a descent job at responding. :)

Module rewrite with developers/integrators in mind

4.x makes much greater use of Drupal's entity API dropping some of its very specific chaining API. Feel free to take a look at the roadmap ticket for specifics.

New UI

We now have a much nicer UI for creating, editing and sorting sitemaps as well as sitemap types.

API usage

In a nutshell, sitemap variants are now sitemap entities. These are of a sitemap type (sitemap type entity) that is defined by URL generator plugins as well as sitemap generator plugins.

When migrating content with the Drupal 8 migrate module, the creation and updating of new entities may fire lots of custom module hooks. This may or may not be desired; if you have found yourself here, it probably interferes with the source data in a problematic way, or unnecessarily slows down the migration process.

The cleanest way I found to stop specific hooks for specific migrations, is to add a dummy/meta field to the migration and check for its value in the hook.

Include a dummy field in the migration

In the process section of the migration, add a field with a name that will not interfere with any field name of the target entity: