[UPDATE] OSMap is now ready. Click here to download OSMap.

Over a month ago, we wrote a post called "The Future of XMap", wondering whether the extension could be revived.

Very little has changed since that post and we've come to the conclusion that we should continue development of the extension under a different name.

For people using Joomla, it's absolutely essential that there be a reliable and free sitemap extension. A sitemap is absolutely critical if you want to successfully optimize your site for Google.

So today we're announcing OSMap, which we'll release in the next couple of weeks.

Starting with the current XMap framework, our first steps will be clean up the user interface to match Joomla 3 and fix the major bugs.

Once that is done, we aim to integrate Xmap more closely with OSMeta so that it's really easy to include or exclude pages from Google's search results. Ideally it will take just one click to decide when a page is indexed or private. We also want to make sure that OSMap integrates successfully with major extensions.

Watch this space for the launch of OSMap, and if you have any feature requests, please let us know in the comments below ...