Voodoo Programming » WP Plugin

LiveSearch 1.3

Constantinos — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:01:43 +0000

I’ve finished work on LiveSearch 1.3 some time ago, just never got around to creating a tarball and uploading it to this site. The major change was that it no longer requires that the searchform.php and livesearch.css files be manually copied to your themes directory. If you want to make theme-specific changes to it you can still have a copy of those files in your theme directory, and if they’re found there they will be used instead of the default ones. Plus a few bug fixes and javascript improvements here and there.

If you’re interested, I created a Google Code project for this and all the files are stored there.

As before, here are quicklinks to the zip archive and the gzipped tarball, as well as the main LiveSearch post.

LiveSearch 1.2

Constantinos — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:02:32 +0000

Ok. I’ve widgetized this plugin, and updated the headers of the plugin. Now you can just install it, and put it anywhere on your sidebar using the Widget plugin. In its options you can specify whether or not you want the searchbox to be encompassed in the default widget wrappers (disabled by default). Pretty straight forward.

The css still needs to be updated, but I don’t know if I’ll be getting to that anytime soon. Any upgrades/suggestions anyone might have are more than welcome.

Here is a quicklink to the zip archive. Original files are always linked from the main LiveSearch post.

LiveSearch Update

Constantinos — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:55:48 +0000

I’ve updated the code to include an option for the size of the search box which I neglected the first time around. I also crudely fixed up the code so that no javascript errors occur when a page without the searchbox is loaded. (For example on my site, any page outside the blog). I’ve done some preliminary testing and it seems to work. If anyone can (or wants to) improve on this, please do so! The archive files on the original post have been updated to reflect the new changes.

The next step would be to fix up the css a little bit. One thing I don’t like on my site is that the first result is not indented properly with the rest… I need to take a look at that. Also, would anyone be interested in moving all the color/size options for the css in the wp-options page? Is this a good/bad idea? This would be done by moving the css outside of the file and into the plugin code, so it gets printed directly in the header rather than linked to. It would make it relatively easier to make simple changes, but much harder to customize the css completely. It’s not that hard to do it, I just don’t know if people would prefer it that way or not. Also worth to note that with an external css file people can customize a different css for each of their themes if they are using multiple ones, whereas with all the color/size options moved into the WP Options page, then all that would have to be changed manually…

LiveSearch

Constantinos — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 13:39:17 +0000

You might notice the spiffy little search box on the navigation bar of this blog. It’s an implementation of the LiveSearch code which I incorporated recently.

It’s a nice little tool, using pretty straight basic (albeit a bit complex) AJAX code. However it did require some effort to implement this, as several files needed to to be modified, and the required files placed all over the place. This meant that the ability to use this tool was restricted to people with some understanding of PHP, and also did not enable the clean integration of the code in WordPress.

So what I have done is integrate the required code/css into a small plugin which can be managed via the WordPress administration section. The plugin consists of a single directory which should be placed in your wp-content/plugins directory, as well as two files that should be placed in your chosen theme directory. If you use multiple themes (for example via the Theme Switcher plugin), then you should place a copy of these two files in the directory of each theme you want to use it in. The two files are:


livesearch.css

searchform.php

The first one is so that users can style the LiveSearch boxes so it fits with their chosen theme, and users should not be required to make manual modifications to their code every time they change a theme. The second file is a replacement of the existing one, and enables the LiveSearch box. In case the plugin is disabled from the WordPress admin section (or simply disabled from the LiveSearch Options page, or the plugin deleted from the plugins directory), then the default search box will be displayed instead, without breaking its functionality (with some minor modifications). Note that running your WordPress installation with LiveSearch enabled will turn the “Search” button off, but disabling the plugin will turn it back on.
Updated 2007-03-27: LiveSearch 1.3 is now up! No files need to be moved to make this version work. You can edit livesearch.css in-place, in its plugin directory. If you wish to maintain multiple themes, then you can still move livesearch.css into your theme directory. A style file found in the current theme’s directory will always be used over the one located in the plugin directory.

Updated 2008-03-17: Updated to LiveSearch 1.4, to support WordPress 2.5.

As a side note, the outputed html should be XHTML Strict, with tentative WCAG triple-a compliance (like the rest of this site. Visit the accessibility page for more information.

Download:

You can download the plugin from its WordPress Plugin Directory, unpack it and follow the README instructions to install it (which are pretty much a review of this post).

As is always the case in this sort of thing, there are no guarantees. The plugin should work, but just in case make a backup of any files you replace (though now you shouldn’t need to even do that). There’s always room for improvement, and I’m not just referring to the LiveSearch code, but also to the plugin wrapper. Feel free to comment.

Change Log

v1.4 – Plugin works with WordPress 2.5 (thanks to the Korean Club despair blog) and is now also hosted on the WordPress Plugin Directory
v1.3 – Plugin now completely drag-and-drop, no need to copy any files anywhere. Minor bug fixes/improvements in javascript code. Now hosted on Google Code
v1.2 – Plugin widgetized, minor javascript changes
v1.1 – Fixed potential javascript errors
v1.0 – Original plugin, LiveSearch code copy/pasted directly without modifications

For more detailed explanations of the changes in each version, follow the series links in the sidebar.

WP-Cron-Mail plugin

Constantinos — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:20:30 +0000

Another tool I decided to use was WordPress’ post-by-email feature. However this was very limiting, as after posting via email usually action was required within WordPress – visit the wp-mail.php page, and then modify the post to place it in the necessary categories etc.

The first problem is overcome by using the wp-cron-mail plugin which comes with the wp-cron plugin. However I still wanted some more functionality from this.

My modification to wp-cron-mail.php accomplishes the following things:

Adds the option of specifying which categories the post should be placed in. This is accomplished by (optionally) having the first non-empty line of your email message be in the form of:

{* Category Name, Another category name, catID *}

where “Category Name” can be any text. If the specified category exists it will be correctly identified, if not it will be created. catID needs to be the ID number of an existing category. You can use either method to define categories, or both of them together.
Limits posting to registered users only. When an email is received the plugin will try to match the Reply-To: address (or if that does not exist, the From: address) with all the emails of the registered users. If such an address is found, then the owner of that email address will be assigned as author (as with the default version of this plugin). Even though posting this way is strictly limiting, the option to override this is provided through the Options page, where you have the ability to either allow all email addresses, or provide a list of additional allowed email addresses (which can be empty – the default). With either of the last two options, if a message is posted from a non-registered email address, it will be marked as authored by the admin of the blog.
Added the ability to replace wp-mail.php with a single function call to take advantage of the wp-cron-mail improvements, with the option of sending a notification email if posts are retrieved through this file, instead of just outputing the results to the browser.
Added an Options page in the admin section to manage a lot of the configurable options of this plugin.

You can download a copy of this file in a zip archive or a tarball, which include a README file with instructions for replacing wp-mail.php. Before you use these files however, you should make sure of two things: that your wp-mail.php file is indeed working (to ensure that you do not suffer from the known bug that WordPress is still suffering from), and also that you have a working installation of wp-cron-mail. Then you can go ahead and replace that file with the one found here.

As always, no guarantees, and there is always room for improvement. I haven’t changed the code from the original wp-cron-mail, merely added to it. And it seems to be working, both this and the previous post were posted using this plugin . Feel free to comment.

UPDATE: Apparently something went wrong with this plugin… If you visited this site in the first 3 hours after this post was posted, you would notice something very strange… all spaces were encoded as “=20″!!! I need to track this down…