Website search

10 posts by 6 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: October 21, 2010   (RSS)

By fleff - October 14, 2009

I'm trying to set up a website where viewers can get information about services in our area such as attorneys, plumbers, restaurants, art galleries, etc. I can get it to work to list Attorneys or Architects or whatever in a section I set up for Licensed Professionals. It displays a list of businesses in each profession. But now I want to be able to specify the specialties of each separate business and to enable a viewer to search from the home page for a specialty, such as "real estate law" or "estate planning". In the case of a restaurant, "seafood" or "Italian" or whatever. So I have to get these keywords into the database somehow for each individual business -- and a search from the home page has to cover multiple sections. I have searched the forum for guidance and studied the demo example but can't figure it out. How can I do this? Thanks for your help.

Farnham

Re: [fleff] Website search

By Chris - October 14, 2009

Hi Farnham,

How about adding a new field to each of your sections called "specialty"?

One of the easiest and best ways to add search capabilities to your site is to use [url http://www.google.com/sitesearch/]Google Site Search[/url].

Please let me know if this helps or if you need a different solution.
All the best,
Chris

Re: [chris] Website search

By fleff - October 14, 2009

Thanks, Chris. I'll try the "specialty" field for each section and see if I can search all of them from one form on the home page. That would be great. I'll let you know if (when?) I get it to work.

Farnham

Re: [fleff] Website search

By Mikey - July 10, 2010

Fleff, did you ever get a site-wide search working on your site? I need to build one and can't seem to find any information on achieve a site-wide search. I don't want to use google's site search, so if you can share your solution, I'd really appreciate the help.

Zickey

Re: [zickey] Website search

By fleff - July 10, 2010

Zickey,

I haven't gotten there yet. The site still has a long way to go. There are others out there who know much more about this than I do and maybe one of them will read this and get back to you. I'm also working on another CMSB website where it's more likely I could use a site-wide search. If I come up with anything, I'll let you know.

fleff

Re: [chris] Website search

By Codee - July 16, 2010

I know it's an older post but wanted to toss in a quick comment. Google site search is only as relevant as the number of times/frequency googlebot spiders your site and ranks the data it pulls. On newer sites or sites with little traffic or infrequent data changes - it just doesn't cut it the way you would expect it to. IF the googlebot recrawled the site at least daily or several times per day, then it would be MUCH more effective and efficient. This is why so many of us want to have a search function through CMSB on the sites we build - because all of our searchable/desirable data is stored right in the MySQL database and it's fast to get. The problem is having to build a search function for each site or as the site changes (read 'new sections added'), etc. If there are sections that relate to other sections this can be very difficult - especially for neophytic programmers such as myself. It's a constant retooling process and the code strings can get very long on manually coding the search parameters.

Our customers need a CMSB-based fully-searchable function plugin. Our customers site visitors need true site search capability powered by the site's own database and CMSB functions. As programmers we need to be able to do this readily and easily with CMSB >> therefore some type of comprehensive plugin is long overdue and we are constantly begging for it. Of course, it can be a daunting task to build such a plugin but building it so that the CMSB site programmer can pick/choose the setup parameters based on the sections and datatypes built into the CMSB site core could make it a terrific plugin.

Thanks for listening. Still LOVE this product, the service and the great attitude from the IT team! Just begging for a couple more core plugins that will ice the cake and make CMSB a more universally able tool.

Re: [Donna] Website search

By Codee - July 19, 2010

Hi Donna, are you stating that Google bot arrives at and indexes your site every half hour? Is it a classified sales site? what kind of site and are you changing the data that regularly?

Re: [equinox69] Website search

By mingyq - October 20, 2010

Any update on this? I'm in need of a Search Plugin for a current client and would rather not use Google search (additional cost, 3'rd party solutions bla bla). A Search Plugin would be perfect. Is it in the works?

MingyQ

Re: [mingyq] Website search

By Mikey - October 21, 2010

MingyQ,
Have a look at the thread below. Dave provided a nice multipleSearch.php file to help get people started building their own site side search engines. I'm using in on a few different sites and it works very nicely.

http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=61466&

Zick