I recently installed PHP Sitemap Generator to manage the sitemaps for my web sites and I have to say I am very impressed. I've been looking for a decent sitemap generator for a while that would handle the large number of dynamically generated pages at my t-shirt shop, WheeDesign.com. Previous products would stop running after a couple of thousand pages because of time out or memory issues.

PHP Sitemap Generator from http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ took maybe 5 minutes to download and install and I had a complete site map a couple of hours later. It took a couple of hours because there are about 150,000 pages on the site. The site map for this site took all of 10 seconds to generate.

I like that the software will split up your sitemap into multiple files if it gets too large. This way Google is sure to read the whole thing. The generator also pings Google, Yahoo, Live.com and numerous other search engines to let them know there is a new sitemap to download.

There were a couple of options that I set differently from the default to make it work better for me.

1. I know that the final product item pages at WheeDesign.com don't need to be parsed. They are essentially the end of the line for the site. So I included the 'item/' string in the Do not parse URLs: setting. That way those pages are listed in the sitemap but not followed any further, saving time and memory.
2. I had memory problems the first time I ran the generator, mostly because of the previous issue, but to save on memory usage, i choose to let the generator take a little more time and turned on the use temporary files to store crawling progress setting under Advanced Settings.

After those couple of tweaks, I've got the generator running smoothly. So if you;re a web developer and you're looking for a simple,yet powerful way to build and maintain your XML site maps, this is the PHP XML Sitemap Generator is for you.