While web crawlers are able to discover pages from links within the site and from other sites, XML sitemaps supplement this approach by allowing crawlers to quickly and comprehensively identify all URLs included in the sitemap and learn other signals about those URLs using the associated metadata.
See https://make.wordpress.org/core/2020/06/10/merge-announcement-extensible-core-sitemaps/ for more details.
This feature exposes the sitemap index via `/wp-sitemap.xml` and exposes a variety of new filters and hooks for developers to modify the behavior. Users can disable sitemaps completely by turning off search engine visibility in WordPress admin.
This change also introduces a new `esc_xml()` function to escape strings for output in XML, as well as XML support to `wp_kses_normalize_entities()`.
Props Adrian McShane, afragen, adamsilverstein, casiepa, flixos90, garrett-eclipse, joemcgill, kburgoine, kraftbj, milana_cap, pacifika, pbiron, pfefferle, Ruxandra Gradina, swissspidy, szepeviktor, tangrufus, tweetythierry.
Fixes#50117.
See #3670. See #19998.
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git-svn-id: http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk@47839 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd
John Blackbourn
Pascal Birchler