Plugin Author
Aaron
(@aaron13100)
On the Options page at the bottom of “Advanced Settings Etc” there’s an option called “Exclude Specific Pages, Posts, Categories, Etc” and you can add the 404 page there, then click “Save Settings” at the bottom and that page will be excluded from suggestions.
Perfect – thanks… Where do I give enhancement requests?
It would be nice to include a sitemap url to other sites (eg. news site) and the suggestions module will pickup urls from there. Possible?
Plugin Author
Aaron
(@aaron13100)
Ah, so you want the suggestions to include links to other sites?
And you want the list of possible suggestions to be picked up from a sitemap.xml file? It’s my understanding that a sitemap xml is only for the current site.
You decide whats easy… one way or other:
1. upload csv file with all possible urls to suggest (static)
2. provide rss feed urls of any site (dynamic, if news feed changes – suggestions change)
3. provide xml sitemap urls to any site (partially dynamic but read @ time of specifying only) – sitemaps if available, are public for anyone to read.
The idea is to have a list of urls to look into when suggesting… not just urls of current site. Its a lot of work I guess, so tread carefully 🙂
Plugin Author
Aaron
(@aaron13100)
If the list of suggestions is static then it’s easy – just don’t use the shortcode and put the pages you want on your custom 404 page.
Currently the way the suggestions works is by matching on URLs. So “domain.com/about1” is close to “about” and not close to domain.com/contact so normally the contact page wouldn’t be suggested. If there’s a list of static or dynamic URLs it seems unlikely that what the user typed would be a close match to one of the URLs. Can I assume you don’t care about the closeness in terms of spelling for the suggested pages? If not then how do we choose which suggestions to show?
I do care about the closeness of the url spelling. But there can be similar sites or related sites. For example some article on bitcoin is not on my site, but if I can point the user to bitcoin article on another of my own sites (or some other site) – it will help the user. You will still match the user’s entered url (without hostname) with the list of all urls in the kitty (csv/sitemap/feed) and find the best matches.
Plugin Author
Aaron
(@aaron13100)
It’s a good idea. Your hunch was right though and I’m not so interested in adding functionality to the plugin right now. I’ve been working on my flashcards app/website instead so I’m spending my time on that lately.
I might get around to automatically excluding the 404 page from suggested results though as that seems like an obvious improvement (or a bug fix).
If you’re a programmer I’m open to help. The code is on github.
Yes I am a programmer, but not a noble one I guess…
I should start contributing on open source in my free time… if only I could get free time! I will contact you on wp slack.
