Hey folks.

For those of you not following bug 21919, the google news sitemap extension has progressed quite a bit. This extension was developed to give Wikinews 2 features: *(primarily) An alternative means of informing google what articles are published. Currently google screen scrapes the main page, this extension would provide a more machine readable interface for google. *It would also provide us with per category RSS feeds that are not toolserver hacks.

^demon recently enabled it on test wikipedia. I encourage everyone to test it out, make sure it works etc. The url is http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:GoogleNewsSitemap for the xml sitemap, and http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:GoogleNewsSitemap?feed=atom for the rss feed. It takes several other options, similar to DPL. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GoogleNewsSitemap for more information.

At the moment, the version at testwiki has two issues - the flagged revs related options don't work, and certain system messages (things in mediawiki namespace) are replaced with <name of message>. Hopefully both those issues will be fixed soon. If you find anything else, please let me know.

Cheers, bawolff