Integration with OSMap / XMap

Puts your products and your categories in your Joomla sitemap, so that search engines are told about them instead of having to find them by following links.

OSMap, and the sitemap extensions built on the same plugins, only know about the content Joomla itself manages. This plugin teaches them about your shop: for every HikaShop menu item in your sitemap, it walks the categories under it and lists the products they hold.

What it does

• Adds your categories and your products to the sitemaps of OSMap, mapX and any sitemap extension reading the same plugins.
• Works from your menu items, so a sitemap covering only part of your shop lists only that part.
• Follows your category tree as deep as you want, or stops at the depth you set.
• Lets you cap how many products are listed per category, for a shop with a very large catalogue.
• Lists a product or a category once, or once per place it appears in, whichever you prefer.
• Sets the priority and the change frequency search engines are given for your product pages, or leaves them to the menu item they came from.
• Sends the product images along with the pages, so your catalogue can be picked up by image search.
• On a shop served on several domain names, with the Domains plugin, each domain gets a sitemap holding the products it actually sells, with its own addresses.

What it looks like

The plugin's settings: how deep to follow your categories, how many products to list, whether an item may appear more than once, and the priority and change frequency to report.

Your shop in the sitemap, categories and products alongside the rest of your site.

The settings

They are all in the plugin itself, in Extensions > Plugins, and they apply to every HikaShop menu item of your sitemaps.

• Maximum depth: how far the plugin follows your category tree under a menu item. With 1 it lists the categories directly under it and their products, with 2 it also goes one level deeper, and so on. Leave it empty to follow the whole tree, however deep it goes.
• Maximum products: how many products are listed for each category. Leave it empty to list them all. It is meant for a very large catalogue, where a complete sitemap would be too heavy: with 50, each category contributes its first 50 products.
• Show same product: a product placed in several categories appears once per category with "Yes". With "No", it is listed the first time it is met and skipped afterwards, which gives one address per product in the sitemap.
• Show same category: the same, for a category reachable from several places in the sitemap.
• Priority: the priority reported for your categories and products, from 0.0 to 1. It tells a search engine how these pages rank against the other pages of your website, not against the pages of other websites. "Use Parent Menu Settings" keeps the priority of the menu item the products were found under, which is what your sitemap extension already applies to the rest of your site.
• Change frequency: how often you tell search engines these pages change, from "Always" to "Never". "Use Parent Menu Settings" keeps the value of the menu item. Search engines treat it as a hint, not as an instruction.
• Change frequency for images: the same value, reported for the product images sent along with the pages. Your sitemap extension has to support images in the sitemap for these to be used.
• Full size images: with "Yes", the address sent for an image is the original file you uploaded. With "No", it is the thumbnail generated by HikaShop, which is smaller and less useful to image search.

Installation

• Easy and quick !
• 1) Install and configure your sitemap extension first, OSMap for instance
  2) Download the plugin on our website
  3) Install it on your Joomla website (extension manager)
  4) Enable the plugin
  5) Your categories and products appear in the sitemap, under the HikaShop menu items it already covers

• Works with OSMap and mapX. Xmap itself is no longer supported by its authors and is not supported here either
• The plugin is compatible with all the editions of HikaShop
• Joomla 3 or newer required
• Compatible with PHP 7 minimum
• GPL v3
• No limit of time
• No limit of use

2.1.0 on the 16th of August 2026

• On a shop served on several domain names, each domain can now have a sitemap of its own, listing the products that domain sells rather than the whole catalogue. This needs the Domains plugin, which decides what belongs to which domain; without it nothing changes.
• The translations of the plugin are now included in the package. They were declared but not shipped, so on a fresh install the plugin appeared as XMAP_HIKASHOP_PLUGIN_NAME and its settings were displayed as raw text keys. The setting for the full size images, which had no text at all, has one now.
• Fixed three PHP notices printed above the sitemap on Joomla 6 with PHP 8.2, one of them on any menu item saved before the images option existed.
• The plugin no longer needs the Joomla plugin "Behaviour - Backward Compatibility" to be enabled.

2.0.1 on the 28th of February 2023

• Completed the information in the update file, so that the Joomla updater offers the new versions of the plugin properly.

2.0.0 on the 20th of April 2022

• Added the support of Joomla 4.
• The addresses in the sitemap now follow the canonical URL of a product or a category, including its translated versions.
• Fixed the addresses of the products listed for a menu item using a brand as its main category.
• Fixed the wrong category being used for a menu item translated with Falang.