How to help people find things on your site

This background is for Site Designers.

Why read this: Understand the options for adding search to the site.

Options:

• You can search just the catalog (i.e. categories and products) or the entire site). 
• If your site is search enabled the Admin user will see the option to Refresh Search Data on the Home page.  This
• Full site search
  • Create a hidden page and put  |.linkins:complexUTFsearch.| n the content are. Make the page title 'Search Results'. Save the page and note the page ID.
  • On the page (or more likely the Template(s) where you want the search box to appear create a search form below is an example with 10 as the page where the search results will be displayed (remember we are using '{' in place the less than symbol (above the comma on your keyboard) and '}' in place of greater than symbol  (above the period on your keyboard.  
    

    {form method='get' action='/cgi-bin/complex2/showPage.pl'}{input type=hidden name='pid' value="10"}
    {input type='text' name='words' style="color:#888;" value="Search Site" 
    onfocus="this.value==this.defaultValue?this.value='':null"}
    {input class='mag' type='image' src="/media/siteBits/mag.gif" title='Click to begin search' }{/form}

  • The system will  display a ranking followed by a short extract of the page's content  If the page has "Meta Description" provided that will be use otherwise it will  use the content with follows the {!--Start Index--} in your template.
• If you site has  a catalog with products it is possible to search the catalog and display products as if they were in a category.  The display format will be controlled by the contents of prodline configuration item, just as if they were in a category.  The results are placed into |.SC_CONTENT.| tag in the standard catalog template.   Click here for more details.
• Search then entire site.  An extension can be activated for your site using the tag |.linkins:UTFsearch.|. This is a key word based search which will cover the entire site. You will also have to add a table click here for table structure.
• Custom searches can be created either by modifying the options described above or by creating an entirely new extension.  Click here for details on extending the CMS.