Sitemap XML

OLDP provides an XML sitemap to help search engines discover and index legal documents. The sitemap is built using Django’s sitemaps framework.

Available URLs

URL	Description
`/sitemap.xml`	Sitemap index listing all section sitemaps
`/sitemap-case.xml`	All court decisions
`/sitemap-court.xml`	All courts
`/sitemap-law.xml`	All laws (latest version only)

Sitemap sections

CaseSitemap (`oldp/apps/cases/sitemaps.py`)

Queryset: All cases ordered by updated_date (descending), with court pre-fetched and list-view fields deferred.
Priority: 1.0
Change frequency: daily

CourtSitemap (`oldp/apps/courts/sitemaps.py`)

Queryset: All courts ordered by updated_date (descending).
Priority: 0.6
Change frequency: default (not set)

LawSitemap (`oldp/apps/laws/sitemaps.py`)

Queryset: Laws where book__latest=True, with content and footnotes deferred, ordered by updated_date (descending).
Priority: 0.9
Change frequency: default (not set)

Caching

Both the sitemap index and section sitemaps are cached for 24 hours (cache_page(86400)) to avoid expensive database queries on every request. See oldp/urls.py for the URL configuration.

robots.txt integration

The Sitemap: directive in oldp/assets/templates/robots.txt points search engine crawlers to the sitemap index. This is the standard mechanism for sitemap discovery (see sitemaps.org).

Pinging Google

After adding or updating content, you can notify Google about the updated sitemap:

.venv/bin/python manage.py ping_google /sitemap.xml

Adding a new sitemap section

Create a sitemaps.py file in the app (e.g., oldp/apps/myapp/sitemaps.py):

from django.contrib.sitemaps import GenericSitemap

from oldp.apps.myapp.models import MyModel


class MyModelSitemap(GenericSitemap):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__(
            {
                "queryset": MyModel.objects.all().order_by("-updated_date"),
                "date_field": "updated_date",
            },
            priority=0.5,
        )

Register the sitemap in oldp/urls.py by adding it to the sitemaps dict:

from oldp.apps.myapp.sitemaps import MyModelSitemap

sitemaps = {
    "court": CourtSitemap(),
    "case": CaseSitemap(),
    "law": LawSitemap(),
    "mymodel": MyModelSitemap(),
}

The key (e.g., "mymodel") determines the section URL: /sitemap-mymodel.xml.

Key files

oldp/urls.py — sitemap URL configuration and sitemaps dict
oldp/apps/cases/sitemaps.py — CaseSitemap
oldp/apps/courts/sitemaps.py — CourtSitemap
oldp/apps/laws/sitemaps.py — LawSitemap
oldp/assets/templates/robots.txt — robots.txt with Sitemap: directive
oldp/apps/homepage/tests/test_views.py — sitemap integration test