Tweaking Searches

By Arvind Satyanarayan on September 5, 2004 | Filed under Design & Templates | Comments (10)

The search form that comes with default MT templates is very limited in what it lets you do - basically it only lets you search the current blog and allows you to not specify any oother options. Here are some things you can do with searches. The code listed here can go into any template but the code must be placed within the search form ie <form>....</form>. Also each block of code is independent. You don't need to use previous code for it to work - as long as it is placed within the search form it will work no matter what other code you have or have not implemented !

Search Where ?

Replace the search form code you have with something like this

<form method="get" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>">
<label for="search" accesskey="4">Search: </label><br /><input type="text" name="search" size="20" alt="Search Term" id="search" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Search" /><br />
Blogs: <input type="checkbox" name="IncludeBlogs" value="4" id="Main Blog" /><label for="Main Blog">Main Blog</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="IncludeBlogs" value="5" id="Sideblog" /> <label for="Sideblog">Sideblog</label><br />
</form>

You will of course need to adapt this, replace the numbers for value with the blog ids of your blogs (to find the blog id, go to the menu for your blog and look at the address bar, you'll see something like &blog_id=x where x is your blog id) You can duplicate the IncludeBlogs input for as many blogs as you need - just make sure you change the blog ids as well !

Search What?

You can specify what to search ie Entries, Coments or both with this simple snippet. Just add it within your search form

<input type="radio" name="SearchElement" value="entries" id="Entries" /> <label for="Entries">Entries</label> <input type="radio" name="SearchElement" value="comments" id="Comments" /> <label for="Comments">Comments</label> <input type="radio" name="SearchElement" value="both" id="Both" /> <label for="Both">Both</label>

Search When ?

You can specify the time frame to search, simply add this code to your search form

<select name="SearchCutoff">
<option value="7">one week back</option>
<option value="14">two weeks back</option>
<option value="30">one month back</option>
<option value="60">two months back</option>
<option value="90">three months back</option>
<option value="365">one year back</option>
<option value="99999">the beginning</option>
</select>

How Much

You can also specify how many results you wish to return from the search per blog. Again just add this code within your search form

<select name="MaxResults">
<option value="5">5</option>
<option value="10">10</option>
<option value="15">15</option>
<option value="25">25</option>
<option value="50">50</option>
<option value="100">100</option>
<option value="99999">All</option>
</select>

Case and Regex

There are two more things you can do. The first is match case, put this somewhere in your search form

<input type="checkbox" name="CaseSearch" id="Case" /> <label for="Case">Match case</label>

The next is a regex option (see What is a Regex Search ?). Put this code somewhere within your search form

<input type="checkbox" name="RegexSearch" id="Regex" /><label for="Regex">Regex Search</label>

Search Throttle

With MT 3.1, a new feature called search throttle has been implemented. This feature prevents people from doing more than one search every minute - by the default setting. Now this is quite annoying so to change that you will need to edit the file Search.pm found in lib/MT/App. Towards the top you'll see something:

if ($time > time - 60) {   ## Within the last minute.

The number (60) can be changed to whatever time length you want, it is in seconds. I have changed it to 20.

Etc.

You can do even more, see these tutorials:

10 Comments

Michael Ditto said:
on Apr 5, 2005 11:26 PM | Reply

Arvind, I am looking for a way to have the search always act as an "exact phrase" and complete word search without the user having to type quotes in.

I'm working on TalkLeft.com, and Jeralyn says that prior to upgrading to 3.15 it always behaved that way. For instance, she wants a search for [patriot act] to always return entries about the Patriot Act but not entries that say [joe blow, a true patriot, acted with valor]. Right now it's returning every entry that has any combination of partial words in it.

Here is the search form:

<form method="get" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>">
<label for="search" accesskey="4">
<div class="sidetitle">
Search</div></label><br>
<input id="search" name="search" size="19" style="background-color: #99CCFF"/>
<input type="hidden" name="SearchElement" value="entries" />
<input type="hidden" name="IncludeBlogs" value="<$MTBlogID$>" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" style="background-color: #FFFF99">
</form>

George Huff said:
on Jan 5, 2007 10:52 PM | Reply

I am running into throttle problems for Movable Type 3.33. I looked for the same bit of code as 3.1 and it's slightly different, as there is no exact number for the the throttle.

Looks like:

## Combine user-selected included/excluded blogs
    ## with config file settings.
    for my $type (qw( IncludeBlogs ExcludeBlogs )) {
        $app->{searchparam}{$type} = { };
        if (my $list = $cfg->$type()) {
            $app->{searchparam}{$type} =
                { map { $_ => 1 } split /\s*,\s*/, $list };
        }
        next if $no_override{$type};
        for my $blog_id ($q->param($type)) {
            if ($blog_id =~ m/,/) {
                my @ids = split /,/, $blog_id;
                s/\D+//g for @ids; # only numeric values.
                foreach my $id (@ids) {
                    next unless $id;
                    $app->{searchparam}{$type}{$id} = 1;
                }
            } else {
                $blog_id =~ s/\D+//g; # only numeric values.
                $app->{searchparam}{$type}{$blog_id} = 1;
            }
        }

Any thoughts? Thanks.

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