How to make and AJAX live search?

[tominated]

Does anybody know how to make a live search for my own website? or even a tutorial (that involves indexing your site)? I would really like one that acts like spotlight. Thanks in advance😉

 

[besson3c]

Does anybody know how to make a live search for my own website? or even a tutorial (that involves indexing your site)? I would really like one that acts like spotlight. Thanks in advance😉

Your content needs to reside in a dynamic backend for a search like this to work. If your pages are static, you might be able to build a database based on f lat file by spidering your site, but certainly your best bet will be to use a relational database backend.

Are you comfortable with creating dynamic content?

 

[tominated]

i guess i am ok with that. I do have wordpress and a forum, so this would be my best bet.

 

[rogersmj]

There are AJAX search plugins for Wordpress already. This is not a simple matter that someone can just explain in a forum post, unfortunately. It's going to depend on how your site is setup. There are tons of tutorials out there; Google some and check them out. However, the easiest course of action is going to be to get one of the plugins for Wordpress and modify it to suit your needs.

 

[tominated]

it's just that i want it for my whole site, not just wordpress. I have searched and searched and searched, but i cannot find what i want. The only thing relatively similar to what I want is the wordpress plugin, "addicted to live search", but i can only use it with wordpress, not my whole site.

 

[besson3c]

it's just that i want it for my whole site, not just wordpress. I have searched and searched and searched, but i cannot find what i want. The only thing relatively similar to what I want is the wordpress plugin, "addicted to live search", but i can only use it with wordpress

Use WordPress to drive your site, and use mod_rewrite rules to convert WordPress URLs to URLs outside of the WP directory.

 

[tominated]

Use WordPress to drive your site, and use mod_rewrite rules to convert WordPress URLs to URLs outside of the WP directory.

I don't want wordpress to drive my site as i am using rapidweaver. I like it the way it is, but thanks anyway😉

 

[besson3c]

I don't want wordpress to drive my site as i am using rapidweaver. I like it the way it is, but thanks anyway😉

Well, you'll need a dynamic backend to provide a search engine of the content provided on your site. Rapidweaver develops static content, so if you really want this feature you are going to have to make some modifications to your site.

Like I said, there are some search scripts that will spider through your content and create a searchable index, but this script would need to be run periodically to generate a new index, and in doing so your searches will not find new content until your index is updated. This is yet another reason for moving to a database-driven/dynamic backend.