March 26, 2023

The Permalinks Cascade Plugin

Sitemaps, Hyper-lists and Beyond.

The Permalinks Cascade is a lightweight solution to enhancing a WordPress website with a multi-page Site Tree, Google Sitemaps and News Sitemaps. Thanks to Gutenberg blocks, hyper-lists of Posts, Pages, Custom Posts and Terms are swiftly added to any of your website’s page. Developed prioritising user-friendliness, The Permalinks Cascade is a totally plug-and-play plugin.

An overview of the major features:

A Family of Dynamic Sitemaps

Be it a Site Tree, a collection of Google Sitemaps or a Google News Sitemap, the sitemap of your choice will always be up-to-date. The Permalinks Cascade produces sitemaps dynamically and, dynamically, adapts them to the size of your website.

The Dashboard

Where you can control the activation of the sitemaps and the enabling of the automatic pinging functionality, choose which types of content to include, adjust the sitemap split-up threshold, reorder with a drag-and-drop the hyper-lists composing the Site Tree, and generally know details about the building process and the latest pinging events.

Code-free Customisation

WordPress-like settings pages together with the plugin’s dashboard are where all your customisations take place. No need to be a developer to use The Permalinks Cascade.

Custom Post Types Support

You can include in the sitemaps any kind of content, custom or built-in. Yes, even in the Google News Sitemap.

Block-enabled

Four Gutenberg Blocks will let you insert a hyper-list of Pages, Posts, Custom Posts or Terms inside any kind of WordPress Post editable through the Gutenberg Editor. Each one of the Blocks is supplied with a settings panel and a in-editor-preview functionality.

Exclude and Disallow, Even in Bulk

Posts, Pages and Custom Posts can be excluded, singly, from the editor screen of WordPress or more at once, by using the Bulk Edit UI. And with no more than a tick of a checkbox you can add to the robots.txt file generated by WordPress a Disallow rule for each web page excluded from the Google Sitemaps.

XML Sitemap Index

An expanding website cannot welcome Googlebot but with a Sitemap Index: The Permalinks Cascade creates a distinct sitemap, or a group of sitemaps, for each type of content the included permalinks belong to, and the best part is that The Permalinks Cascade can silently switch between single and multi-sitemap mode while keeping unchanged the location of the main sitemap.

Automated and Upon-request Pinging

The Permalinks Cascade can ping Google both on request, and automatically whenever a permalink is added to a Google Sitemap or to a News Sitemap. A chronological log of the latest thirty pinging events is always at hand when you need it.

Site Tree Pagination

When the need comes to untangle the usability of a medium-to-large Site Tree, the pagination facility is never slow to take action.

Compatible with WPML

You will be able to show localised versions of your Site Tree to the people visiting your WPML-powered website, and your Google Sitemaps will be complete with information about the language of your website’s public web pages.

This is a Ghost Page

When a page is flagged as Ghost Page, The Permalinks Cascade automatically excludes the Page from all the sitemaps and hyper-lists, prevents the WP Super Cache plugin from caching the Page and hides the Page from crawlers without showing up its path in the robots.txt file.

A Dynamic Shortcode and a Flexible Template Tag

Fully documented and always ready-to-use, the [permalinks-cascade] shortcode and its workmate tpc_get_hyperlist() are flexible like only a few other developer tools, they fittingly complement Gutenberg Blocks — you just have to change one attribute, or argument, for a whole new, dynamic list of hyperlinks to be all set for your visitors.

A Site Tree made up of details:

Drag-and-drop reordering of the hyper-lists composing the Site Tree.
Hierarchical or flat list styles.
Group Pages by Topic
De-hyperlinking of parent Pages up to the third level.
Exclude all child Pages.
Order Pages by menu order or title.
Group Posts by date, category or author with the ability to toggle the hyperlinking of the group’s title.
Order Posts by title, publication date or popularity.
Order Custom Posts by title or publication date.
Stick featured Posts on top of the hyper-list.
Show an excerpt of user defined length for Posts.
Show authors’ avatar and biographical info.

Installation

Upload in the ‘plugins’ folder, and activate.

To Completely Uninstal

Go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen of SiteTree and tick the ‘On uninstalling’ setting — this will enable the deep-uninstallation mode.
Deactivate The Permalinks Cascade from the ‘Plugins’ screen.
Click on ‘Delete’.

Screenshots

The Dashboard.
The Dashboard when the sitemaps are active.
The Pinging Bar.
The Pinging Log.
Drag-and-drop reordering of the hyper-lists composing the Site Tree.
The meta-box of The Permalinks Cascade.
The badges in the 'Excluded From' column represent the resources from which a web page has been excluded.

FAQ

Is there an official documentation available?

Although still a work-in-progress, you can find it at https://luigicavalieri.com/the-permalinks-cascade/help/

What is a Site Tree?

It actually is a Site Map, a human-oriented listing marked up in HTML5 of the most prominent content of your website.

Can I migrate from SiteTree without losing my settings?

Absolutely yes.

When activated for the first time, The Permalinks Cascade will automatically upgrade and migrate SiteTree’s settings and data — it doesn’t matter whether or not SiteTree is inactive when you activate The Permalinks Cascade.

Then, if you want to completely uninstal SiteTree, please follow these steps:

Go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen of SiteTree and tick the ‘On uninstalling’ setting — this will enable the deep-uninstallation mode.
Deactivate SiteTree from the ‘Plugins’ screen.
Click on ‘Delete’.

Is there any chance of running into conflicts with the Core Sitemap functionality introduced in WordPress 5.5?

No, there isn’t. The plugin automatically disables the Core Sitemap functionality when the Google Sitemap is active.

Are the XML Sitemaps produced by The Permalinks Cascade human-readable?

Yes, they are. Although the Google Sitemaps and the Google News Sitemaps are crawler-oriented sitemaps, they are all equipped with an XSL Template that makes them human-readable.

Can The Permalinks Cascade generate Google Sitemaps complete with Change Frequency and Priority metadata?

No, it cannot. The use of such metadata has become obsolete by now.

Changelog

2.2 (26 May 2022)

As, time ago, Bing shut down its pinging service for XML Sitemaps, the plugin now pings only Google when the Pinging functionality is used.

Note: the Pinging Log may still include old log entries about pings sent to Bing.

2.1.1 (24 January 2022)

Fixed a bug that prevented the Google News Sitemap’s stylesheet from loading.

2.1 (10 January 2022)

Improved:

Re-engineered Blocks-related code for improved compatibility with future versions of WordPress.
Updated JS scripts to ECMAScript 6.

Changed:

CSS and JavaScript files are no longer minified.

Fixed:

Gutenberg Blocks could not be inserted in theme’s widgetized areas.
A PHP warning could appear in debug mode while using the WordPress Editor.

2.0.4 (17 December 2021)

Fixed a bug that caused a fatal error when loading the Google Sitemap on WordPress+WPML installations running on PHP 8.

2.0.3 (4 November 2021)

Now you can move the plugin’s admin menu to a parent menu of your choice. In this article is explained how.

2.0.2 (4 October 2021)

Updated the default video thumbnail.

2.0.1 (1 October 2021)

Improved the sanitisation and the escaping of I/O variables.
Fixed a bug that hindered the user from creating new Topics.

2.0 (29 September 2021)

New:

Custom Post Types Support.
Image and Video Sitemaps.
Gutenberg Blocks for Custom Posts and Taxonomies.
A Dynamic Shortcode and a Flexible Template Tag.
Site Tree Pagination.
Compatibility with WPML.