Due to the popularity of my earlier article about creating a WordPress Sitemap without a Plugin and my growing familiarity with the WordPress core, I decided to introduce another possibility. With this one, there are no custom database queries necessary, it solely depends on  already existing WordPress functions:

/**
 * Builds the Sitemap and echoes the HTML
 *
 * @echo Sitemap
 */
function sitemap() {

    $category_array = get_categories(array(
        'exclude_tree'    =>    24
    ));

    $sitemap =    "<h3>" . __( 'Posts','domain' ) . "</h3><ul>";

foreach ( $category_array as $category ) {
    $sitemap .= "<li>".__('Category: ', 'domain').'<a href="'.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).'" title="' . sprintf( __( "View all posts in %s" , 'domain'), $category->name ) . '">'.$category->name."</a><ul>n";
    $post_array = get_posts(array(
        'post_type'    =>    'post',
        'cat'        =>    $category->cat_ID
    ));

    foreach ( $post_array as $post ) {
        $post->post_title = apply_filters( 'the_title', $post->post_title, $post->ID );
        $sitemap .= "<li><a href="" . get_permalink($post->ID) . '" title="' . esc_attr($post->post_title) . '">' . $post->post_title . "</a></li>";
    }
    $sitemap .= "</ul>";
}

$sitemap .= "</li></ul>";
$sitemap .= "<h3>" . __( 'Pages','domain' ) . "</h3><ul>";
$sitemap .= wp_list_pages(array(
    'echo'        =>    false,
    'title_li'    =>    false,
    'exclude'    =>    '343,487,491'
))."</ul>";

 echo $sitemap;
}

The first function obviously grabs all the category objects from the database. This function has a number of possibilites to customize – read about them in the WordPress Codex.

$category_array = get_categories(array(
    'exclude_tree'    =>    24
));

Next, wie go through the categorie objects and fetch the associated posts. Now we can build the unordered list. I slotted the “the_title” filter ahead of the link, to give my plugins the opportunity to work their magic.

foreach($category_array as $category){
    $sitemap .= "<li>" . __('Category: ', 'domain') . '<a href="' . get_category_link($category->cat_ID) . '" title="' . sprintf( __( "View all posts in %s" ), $category->name ) . '">' . $category->name . "</a><ul>";
    $post_array = get_posts(array(
        'post_type'  =>    'post',
        'cat'        =>    $category->cat_ID
    ));

    foreach ( $post_array as $post ) {
        $post->post_title = apply_filters( 'the_title', $post->post_title, $post->ID );
        $sitemap .= '<li><a href="' . get_permalink($post->ID) . '" title="' . esc_attr($post->post_title) . '">' . $post->post_title . '</a></li>';
    }
    $sitemap .= "</ul>";
}

And after all posts have been taken care of, there are only the pages missing (ich exluded the footer pages to only display pages with relevant content):

$sitemap .= wp_list_pages(array(
    'echo'       =>    false,
    'title_li'   =>    false,
    'exclude'    =>    '343,487,491'
))."</ul>";

That’s all there is to it!