I just launched full text search on my blog. I am sure that this is something planned for the future of Croogo but I wanted some to add search functionality and not have to wait. Once I figure out Git/Github I will fork the main project and get some of my additions up there.

Adding full text searching is actually quite easy. I limited it to searching the title and the body of the posts and only allowed searching of blog posts. Below is the code I used. This goes in the nodes controller.

function search () {
  // Import sanitize library
  App::import('Core', array('Sanitize'));

  $query = mysql_escape_string(Sanitize::html($this->params['url']['q']));

  $this->paginate['Node']['order'] = 'Node.id DESC';
  $this->paginate['Node']['limit'] = Configure::read('Reading.nodes_per_page');
  $this->paginate['Node']['conditions'] = array(
    'Node.type' => 'blog',
    'Node.status' => 1,
    "MATCH(Node.title, Node.body) AGAINST('{$query}' IN BOOLEAN MODE)"
    );
  $this->paginate['Node']['contain'] = array(
    'User',
    'Meta',
    'Comment',
    'Term' => array('Vocabulary')
    );

  $this->Node->recursive = 0;
  $this->set('nodes', $this->paginate());
  $this->set('q', $query);
  $this->set('title', "Search results for {$query}");
}

Now all that's needed is a form that will request the search action in the nodes controller and a search template to display your search results. For my form I used the "GET" method. In my search template I used the text helper to highlight the search term and also show an excerpt instead of the full post as shown below.

<p><?=$text->highlight($text->excerpt(strip_tags($this->element('node_body', array('node' => $node))), $q, 200, '...'), $q)?></p>

As usual if you have any questions leave a comment and I should get back to you shortly.

Update November 19th

Croogo Full Text Search

In this post I will describe how I created the featured post on the home page of my blog with Croogo. Looking at the database schema I noticed that there was a column named "sticky" that was not being utilized anywhere in the code so I thought that it would be a good place to store whether a post was featured or not. The first thing I did was edit the admin add and edit views to allow me to mark posts as featured under the publishing tab.

<div id="node-publishing">
<?php
    echo $form->input('sticky', array('label' => __('Featured', true)));
    echo $form->input('status', array('label' => __('Published', true)));
    echo $form->input('promote', array('label' => __('Promoted to front page', true)));
    echo $form->input('created');
?>
</div>

All I did here was add one line that will display a checkbox similar to the published and promoted checkboxes. The next thing I had to do was retrieve the latest featured post from the database. I did this in the nodes controller under the promoted action since this is the default home page for Croogo.

$featured = $this->Node->find('first', array(
    'order' => 'Node.created DESC',
    'conditions' => array('Node.sticky' => true)
));
$this->set('featured', $featured);

This just finds the first post marked as featured, ordered by the created date. I then set a variable for the view so that I can access this featured post in my view. The next step was displaying the featured post. For this I created a "featured" element and rendered it in the layout template if the current action was "promoted".

<? if ($this->action == 'promoted') : ?>
<?=$this->element('featured')?>
<? endif ?>

Inside of featured.ctp in the elements directory.

<p><?=$html->link($featured['Node']['title'], $featured['Node']['url'], array('class' => 'link'))?><p>
<p><?=$text->trim(strip_tags($featured['Node']['body']), 200, '...', false, true)?></p>
<p><?=$html->link('Read More...', $featured['Node']['url'])?></p>

This is a dumbed down version of what I am using but should still get you started. If you know your way around CakePHP you should be able to understand what is happening. I am using the text helper to show an excerpt from the post body then display a read more link below that will direct the user to the post.

This should be enough to get you started. In my next post I will explain how to use custom fields in your posts. I am using them to display the image beside my featured posts on the home page. If you have any questions leave a comment and I should get back to you shortly.