Trophies
Since version 3.1, WoltLab Suite Core ships a trophy system, which allows you to reward users with trophies. The concept behind this is gamification, a proven way to increase positive activity within your community. For example, you can motivate users to write more posts by adding a trophy that will be rewarded once a user reaches a configured number of posts, or you can create a competition where the price for the top ranking members are individual trophies.
Individual
You can easily create unique trophies with the built-in Trophy Badge Designer or upload your own images. The former allows you to create a trophy based off one of more than 500 distinct icons. This combination allows to create trophies that fit into the theme of your community.
(The built-in trophy designer)
Automatically Reward Trophies
We've touched the topic in the introduction above: Some trophies might be awarded for achievements that can be automatically detected by WoltLab Suite. You can use the powerful condition system, already known from the user notices and advertising system, to create trophies that are awarded once a user passes a threshold.
Put on Display
Naturally, users want to show off their hard earned trophies. They can select a so-called subset of “Special Trophies” that will be put on display at notable places, like the message sidebar and their personal user profile. You can decide how many trophies a member can mark as special with a group permissions (up to 5 trophies). To ensure that your users don't miss their new trophies a notification will be sent out when awarding one.
There might be cases where members do not want to show their trophies: The included privacy feature allow users to choose who can see their trophies.
(The user settings to select special trophies)
(The special trophies in the user profile)
(The special trophies in the message sidebar)
Sitemaps
The next version of our WoltLab Suite is capable of automatically creating a sitemap for search engines. Sitemaps serve to improve search engine coverage of your community, by listing URLs in an easily accessible document you can submit to Google, Yahoo and others.
Which Pages will be Indexed
The sitemap automatically contains all pages you create with the page editor integrated in WoltLab Suite Core, as well as all static pages and forms which are provided by third party plugins. Non-static pages are included as well, if the plugin ships with a sitemap integration (adding this integration is easy, checkout the Advanced Usage section here). It goes without saying that all of our products include this integration: WoltLab Suite Forum, for example, ships with a board and a thread sitemap, WoltLab Suite Core offers article categories, articles and users in the sitemap.
Secure and Efficient
Adding broken links to the sitemap would harm the purpose, so the system detects automatically whether a link is visible and indexable for a search engine, avoiding inaccessible links being included in the sitemap. Possible reasons for omission are pages that are not accessible for guests, or pages that do not have the “Allow search spiders to index this page“ flag enabled. To prevent a sitemap from growing without bounds you can also define a time frame for inclusion of pages. Content that is older than this time frame is excluded, because it is assumed that search engines already know about it.
Some content changes more often that others: While new threads are created all the time you might only write a new article every few days. In order to not waste resources each type of sitemap has a custom rebuild interval. You can configure this interval as explained below.
Settings
Each community is unique. To adapt the sitemaps to your community you can configure a several settings for each type of sitemap. The most interesting one is the priority. The priority allows you to communicate to the search engine how relevant a single page is compared to other pages on your site. If you want to put a focus on articles, you can simple increase the value to a higher value to indicate that articles should be visited with a priority. Another setting is the change frequency. It is an indicator for search engines how often is a single page is changed.
Advanced Usage
For huge boards, with many sitemap URLs, you can use the CLI integration to rebuild the whole sitemap.
Developers can easily integrate sitemaps for non static sites in their plugin. More informations are available in our documentation: https://docs.woltlab.com/php_api_sitemaps.html
