I understand how the XOOPS search engine generates the search page. Namely:

1) It 'polls' each of the selected modules and asks them for the top 5 results (based on the given search terms and search conditions).
2) It aggregates these results (grouped by module) and provides a link to the user to 'delve deeper' for any particular module. The resulting page shows a bunch of results -- but only for that module.

I 'get' this. I'm sure you all do to. This page is designed around the way the search engine works in Xoops. But, considering that other popular search engines don't present results in this way, it can be confusing for a site's users to quickly understand what it is they are seeing.

Why is that? Well, for instance, the first module searched (for my site) is one that has very little content in it. So, for a typical search, one of the first things that a user sees is "No Match Found for your Query". There are most likely matches found further down the page ... but that statement throws them off. The first two words probably throws them off. Read "No Match" and (presumably), you're off and wondering what to do now.

So, yeah, it's a matter of training, sure. And I'm lucky enough to be behind a firewall, so better training isn't completely out of the question. But what about you Xoopsers out there that rely on complete strangers to successfully search your site? Have any of you come up with a better search.php implementation that better organizes the search engine's results?

I fooled around with my search.php and came up with a slightly different look-n-feel (9 MiB gif):

Link to Animated Gif

You can see that I've divided each module's results into slots (or drawers) that can be clicked on to view the results. I don't think this has really helped anything in terms of usability ... so I'm back where I started.

Any ideas out there??

What a huge picture (9045.3 KB (9262388 bytes))... wish you'd have included it as a link


(Looks very nice however!)

Point taken (edited post). Sorry.

No problem :)

Just out of interest - is the search.php templated by default?

I liked your search presentation and thought it was a nice effect.

You don't say whether you program or not but if you do you can do something like change the search application to search only the modules you want (in the order you want) and return the results however you'd like to do so. For example you can place search returns into an array sorted by timestamp to show most recent matches first. You can use associative arrays to sort on other non-numeric fields. You'd have to format the data but you'd present matches based on time (or other criteria like uname, user rank , module, whatever or combinations of all) instead of module grouping.

Additionally you should check out the PcWorld/Computerworld.dk sites. These were developed using XOOPS as a replacement for in-house asp apps. They've replaced some of the article modules but specifically they replaced the search engine with the apache open-source Lucene engine. It's pretty fast on the site and I'm sure can be configured to return indexes of anything. See this article HERE.

Here's what I ended up with:



What's the point? A couple of things. First, the modules are sorted by number of hits. This guarantees that modules with little to no hits are grouped toward the bottom of the page. This may help people using the search engine since if they see something like "0 hits returned" at the top ... then 0 hits really were returned. Admittedly, that's subtle and doesn't seem like much, but I'll test it here with my users to see if it gets a better reception.

The second point is that it obviously looks a little different than the output from the normal search.php page in Xoops. I took the time to create a template for the search page. This is something that probably should have been in XOOPS all along, but simply got overlooked. Having this as a smarty template makes it much easier to lay out the results however you'd like!

I'll see about submitting this 'template' change to the XOOPS team to see if it can be rolled into the future 2.0.17 version (anyone know how to do that?).

can you share with us on how you do this ?

Yeah, sure. All the stuff is at work and I won't have time to gather it all together until Monday morning...

[size=x-large]How To: Update XOOPS 2.0.x Search Page to Support the Template Engine[/size]

Overview

Xoops has a template engine that allows you to separate page generation (php code) from page layout and presentation (HTML + CSS). XOOPS also supports a theme engine. This level of customization exists “above” data generation + layout and is outside the scope of this article.

Templates are HTML documents written to make use of Smarty tags. Smarty is an additional language/layer that you must learn in order layout your XOOPS generated HTML. Basically, though, the paradigm is one of adding in tags throughout your HTML that act as placeholders for incoming variables that were set up by the corresponding PHP page.

By default, the search page for XOOPS is found at the root of your XOOPS directory and is called search.php. This page (unlike most) actually generates the HTML necessary to carry out it's assigned task directly inside the PHP code with a series of 'echo' statements. This makes the process of updating the look and feel of the XOOPS search page more difficult since you now have to deal with the functionality of Xoop's search engine too.

This 'How To' documents the process for stripping out layout from function with regards to search.php. At the end of this tutorial, your XOOPS system will have a new system-level template that is associated with your search page. You'll be able to update the look and feel of your search page by manipulating this Smarty template rather than the search.php file directly. Furthermore, the search.php page will now have an interface (or contract) between itself and the corresponding template page that consists of various tags and their meanings. This means that you can tweak search.php whenever you like to change how the search engine works without necessarily affecting the look and feel of the search page itself (unless, of course, your changes necessitate a change to the interface with the template).

Back Up Everything – Use a Test Site – Yadda, Yadda, Yadda

As with anything, be sure to back up your valuable data first before attempting the changes in this document. Make these changes on test site first (if you can). Although nothing here is too invasive, it's important to be sure that you can recover if something goes wrong.

searchform.php

In the “include” folder, there exists a file called searchform.php. This file is responsible for generating the 'advanced search' form that you see at the bottom of every search page. Before we do anything else, we need to make a small change to this form in order to make it compatible with our new search template. At the very bottom of the file, simply add the following line:



What does this do? Instead of the entire PHP page being included into “\search.php” (along with the creation and availability of it's $search_form variable), we treat the include like a function and 'return' the HTML version (produced by the render method) of the form that this file's code generates.

modules/system/xoops_version.php

Your next step is to tell XOOPS about the Smarty template that you are about to create. You're probably already somewhat familiar with modules and how to install/configure them. Interestingly enough, XOOPS treats it's system code like a module. This is why you see the “System Admin” button on the left side of Xoops' administration screen along with buttons for all of the other installed modules. It's because the system module is just that...a module! This is great because not only are you able to quickly and easily figure out how to configure the system in the same way that you'd configure a module, but the folks that wrote the XOOPS core code are able to use the same bits of code for installing/updating system settings as they are for installing/updating modules.

So what? Right? Well, the point of all this is that it is really easy to create a new template for the XOOPS system. All you have to do is write the template (we'll do this later) and define that template for the XOOPS system module. If you don't already know, you define templates for your modules in each module's 'xoops_version.php' file. This file contains lots of things in it that tell XOOPS all about your module, not just template data. But the great thing is that, because of this architecture decision, it's really easy to define a new template. Simply add in this additional code somewhere around line 80:



All we've done here is to define a 16th template. We've given it a file name, 'system_search.html' and a description which will show up whenever we try to edit our system templates.

Create the Smarty Template

Now it's time to really do something. Let's create the Smarty template for rendering our search page by creating a new file called '\modules\system\templates\system_search.html'. Please insert the following HTML/Smarty code into that new file that you just created:



search.php

The last major step involves updating the main search PHP page in the root of the XOOPS system. Since the existing page generates all the HTML, we'll have to overhaul it so that places everything into Smarty template variables and passes those variables to the template we just created instead. So, edit your '\search.php' and make sure it looks like this:



Update the System Module

You've now placed all your shiny new code onto the site, but you won't see anything good yet until you do a couple of things first. First and foremost, you need to 'update' the system module so that your new Smarty template is loaded into the database. Follow these steps to do this:

*) Goto the administration section on your website ('\admin.php').
*) Click the “System Admin” button on the left side of the screen.
*) Click on “Modules”.
*) Click the module update button for the system administration module () and confirm your selection.

You should see the following text somewhere on the screen:

Quote:

Update the Default Template Set (optional)

Hopefully, you are aware of the fact that you can define multiple template sets and select whichever one you'd like to be the 'default' template set for your web site. It would be really great if you could associate template sets with themes (hint, hint) ... but I digress. The point here, is that if you've decided to modify your templates to enhance the visual appearance of your web site (and if you are following these instructions, then that's a pretty safe assumption), you'll want to ensure that the new template we just made available is present in your default template set. Please following these instructions to do so:

*) Goto the administration section on your website ('\admin.php').
*) Click the “System Admin” button on the left side of the screen.
*) Click on “Templates”.
*) In the Template Set Manager, find the row with a check mark in the far right column. This row is the currently selected template set for your site.
*) Click the “List” link to the right of “System” in the Templates column of the Template Set Manager for the currently selected template set (boy that's a mouth full!).
*) On the resulting page find the “system_search.html” row that is highlighted in yellow and click on the “Generate” link. This will ensure that this particular template set has your new search template ready for use.

Conclusion

That's it. Your new search page should be up and running (although you might have to clear out your template cache folder if you're still seeing the old one). You may now customize the look and feel of your site's search page by updating the appropriate template whenever you like. If you think this has been helpful, then please lobby the XOOPS folks to have changes like this added to the core for the next version of Xoops.

thanks rlankford for the detail explanation.....