I've been using BSS for maybe several months, now, and I encounter a lot of bugs, on the regular. Most I just shrug off, and work around, but this is one I could not ignore; so this is my first post on an issue.
Every time something is exported in BSS, no matter how big or small, it exports the Sitemap to reflect ONLY what you export. Sometimes I will work on a page, and then only export that particular page, because it's not really necessary to export the entire build each time.
I had a couple builds, recently, where I was looking at Search Console, and found it strange that certain pages were not being discovered. That's when I discovered this problem.
I tested it, and confirmed it, by exporting a single particular page, and then I checked the sitemap file, and sure enough, it creates a whole new file, and only includes a link to that one file you exported. If I export the whole build, it'll create a full sitemap, of course.
Kind-of an odd thing to do, because it's a bit difficult to export a page, and then for some reason be transferring over a page, and then somehow the sitemap, since you wouldn't typically export your entire build in a scenario, like that. It's not clear how I did that... it might be that I deleted some images, or did a few other things, and then just ran some tests on a page, and then wound-up transferring the whole build, not realizing that my sitemap was just a single page! >.< (that is probably how I did it, by accident)
Sitemaps, in general, need A LOT more support from the framework. When I do big builds, I have never been able to get the HTML templates to import properly into BSS, even though they were literally made inside BSS, so I always have to create independent sitemaps, and for some projects I have several sitemap sections that I'll have to submit to Search Console, as well as manually update.
Not a big deal, but it might be nice to have a utility that would allow me to have more control over what is in the sitemap, so that I can just include my own URLs, among other things. That way I can manually exclude "no-index" pages, if I like, and also so that I can maybe choose how it exports, and what it exports, etc.
The formatting used is also not as robust as it could be. I use Scrapebox to build my independent Sitemaps, and there are some extra bits, in there, that kind-of make me wonder what all we can include.
You can apparently timestamp the update of a URL within the sitemap, which is pretty awesome, because I guess that tells Google when something has been changed. I'm assuming that would maybe increase indexation update speeds?
Scrapebox exports like this:
<url>
<loc>https://www.getivan.com</loc>
<lastmod>2020-09-03</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
So, as you can see, it's got some instructions for indexation frequency, and especially, it informs on the last update to a page, which is pretty neat. I'd be curious to see what else can be added, and some sort of internal utility for custom sitemaps would be convenient.
Anyways... that's it! Sitemap Export Bug Report, and Internal BSS Custom Sitemap Utility Request!
I won't be following this thread, but thanks for going through my report! I appreciate BSS!