DaveCusick
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Sep 27, 2002, 1:37 AM
Post #5 of 7
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Re: [MalaK_3araby] Ideas for Searching
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I actually posted the first two of these in another thread recently, but I've reposted them here since dlo's requested some input, and I've added a couple of new ones.
1) Choose search method - AND/OR. This one's an essential.
2) Make it possible to narrow down search results so that they only contain articles where a specified art_field contains a particular value - this needn't necessary be available as an option on the advanced search page, but it needs to be available as an option you can specify in a search engine query
eg http://www.gamesolutionzone.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi?template=related_articles.html&perpage=5&keyword=prisoner&art_field2=magazine
...so that only results where art_field 2 contained the word "magazine" would be returned.
3) Provide full documentation for all the options you can append to a query - at the minute there isn't any documentation at all (at least none which I can find) so I've ended up performing advanced searches, then stealing bits of the resulting URLs to hardcode as links and includes.
4) This is a bit of a strange one, and I suspect it would be redundant on a MySQL-powered AM, but it would be very useful on systems powered by AM 1.x without SQL support. Basically, add a facility whereby as part of the publishing process you could specify a list of searches, the output of which would be saved as HTML files that you could include in other pages - so instead of having to include dynamically generated search results in, say, your index page, you could include the previously-generated search results, thereby reducing server load and slightly speeding up the page display time.
I see this feature as being a textarea box (or a list of 10ish text boxes) in the admin section of AM, into which you could just type a search engine query, followed by perhaps a comma and then the name of the file you'd like AM to output. Users could list one query on each line of the textarea (so there's no maximum limit on the number you can do). During the publishing process, AM would perform each search just the once and then output the file for you into a given directory (public_html/artman/publish/searchincludes or whatever).
This would be very useful because I've seen a number of very clever solutions to reader questions in this forum that involve including search results in, for instance, the index page (the columns workaround, and the pics-for-top-three-headlines trick) and I'd love to employ some of these on my two AM sites, but I'm conscious of banging the server a bit with endless included search results.
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Dave Cusick (dave.cusick@livepublishing.co.uk)
Group Editor & Web Administrator
Live Publishing International Ltd
www.livepublishing.co.uk
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