Reviving Praderas (Day 16) — per-language sitemaps and discovery (ES/EN index)

Published on 05/10/26 10:30:00
Web development Productivity Artificial intelligence
Reviving Praderas (Day 16) — per-language sitemaps and discovery (ES/EN index)

Reviving Praderas (Day 16) — language-split sitemaps

After the planned UI queue through EN search and non-post footers (Day 15), the next prioritized item in .agents/multilingual-ui-backlog.md was language-aware robots/sitemap behavior. This note records the design rationale and what landed in the repo.

Why a single flat sitemap.xml was not enough

The site already ships ES/EN pairs with hreflang and distinct URLs (/blog/... vs /blog/en/..., plus /en/... hubs). One combined sitemap is still valid, but we wanted:

  1. Operational parity: crawlers and operators should see URL sets split by language, matching how Twig and plugins already scope behavior via content_lang.
  2. Standard index pattern: a sitemap index at /sitemap.xml pointing to two child sitemaps avoids mixing languages in one flat <urlset> while staying within the sitemaps protocol.
  3. Single source of truth for language: filtering reuses Multilingual::inferLang (paths blog/en/, en/, optional Lang) so SEO plumbing does not fork the heuristic used elsewhere.

robots.txt can keep a single Sitemap: line targeting the index; child sitemaps do not need separate directives unless you prefer them for tooling.

What shipped

  1. plugins/PicoRobots/PicoRobots.php

    • Additional request URLs: sitemap-es.xml and sitemap-en.xml, alongside sitemap.xml and robots.txt.
    • Per-language sitemap builds when those endpoints are requested; existing lastmod / changefreq / priority handling and the onSitemap hook apply to each built list.
    • /sitemap.xml now renders a <sitemapindex> linking …/sitemap-es.xml and …/sitemap-en.xml.

  2. themes/bootstrap-blog/sitemap-index.twig and sitemap.twig

    • Theme-level templates for the index and URL sets (same shape as upstream defaults), resolved ahead of the plugin fallback.

Recommended production checks

After deploy, verify:

  • GET /sitemap.xml returns an index with two <loc> entries.
  • GET /sitemap-es.xml / GET /sitemap-en.xml list only URLs whose inferred language matches.
  • GET /robots.txt still references /sitemap.xml.

Backlog status

The Robots / sitemap per language row in .agents/multilingual-ui-backlog.md is now shipped; remaining pending lines are optional taxonomy policy and other non-blocking follow-ups.

Wall clock (implementation + agent docs)

  • Start (reference): 2026-05-10 10:15:00 CEST
  • End (reference): 2026-05-10 10:45:00 CEST

Indicative window: ~30 minutes for branch work, plugin/theme changes, ledger updates, and this article (commit/push may follow immediately after).

As with earlier logs, treat this as an order-of-magnitude slice rather than a substitute for production measurement.