custom search page

Did you try the Supersearch box? It’s ‘amazing’….
https://wppa.nl/docs-by-subject/search/super-search/

Or.. maybe the Album Navigator widget…

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Jacob N. Breetvelt.

I have tried the supersearch. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, as the supersearch selection list shows all albums. Once I’ve finished the import of the historical albums my site will have 12k.

Is there a way to list only parent (i.e. top level) albums in the supersearch selection list?

You should really try the album navigator widget. It shows the top-level albums with + signs if there are children. (there is an issue with the » but i will fix that).
See https://wppa.nl/ sidebar lowest two widgets.

Jacob,

My problem will remain even with the navigator. I am going to have a large number of top level albums (essentially one for each model of Jaguar ever produced, + user “personal” albums, plus a few more like “Jaguars in movies”)

If I reduce the number of top level Albums, then I still need to give the users a chance to search for “gearbox removal” limited to the sub albums of a particular model.

Another question about the search: How do I get it to show the results of the last search below the search box on the landing page?

Something like “Your search found more than N results (x Albums, y photos), would you like to restrict your search to a specific top level album?” might be a possibility, but even then, I would only want to show them the list of top level albums.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by jagwaugh.

Do you have categories in albums defined (like tags for photos) that would be suitable for searching?
If so, i could make a ‘catcloud’ widget like the Tagcloud widget for photos.

How do I get it to show the results of the last search below the search box on the landing page?

If for the supersearch: this will require a minor code change. Pls tell me if you will use it, than i will make the codechanges.

BTW, did you try the search photos widget? It is called photo search, but you can search albums too. Also: see Table IX-E for config options.

Do I only need to create the Album cat on the top level album? (i.e. is there a built in inheritance?)

It’s a bit of a struggle not being able to import albums via .csv. I think I understand the problem, it’s that you can’t know the id of the album ahead of time, right?

I know I could try specifying the album name in the photos.csv, but I have duplicate album names.

I have tried the photo search widget, it works well, but I still need a way to allow a user to specify a specific top level album.

There is an Inherit Cats button on the album admin page, but you will have to do it maunally for all top-level albums…

you can’t know the id of the album ahead of time, right?

right, and also not its parent album if any.

duplicate album names.

Also a problem for album .csv import.

You can enable root search on the widget activation screen.
Once you visited an album, it will show the album name. When the box is ticked, search will be done in the root under and including the specified album only.

Do the ‘searchers’ know in what toplevel album they want to be?
If they e.g. first search for ‘Model123’, and then tick the rootsearch box, and then search for ‘Gearbox’ they will find gearboxes of model 123 only.

Alternatively, just type ‘model123 gearbox’. the results will meet both words.

If you want i can add an option in Table IX-E so that the normal ploto search widget will only find top-level albums. In this case the user can issue (a) searchword(s) to find the top-leve labums they are interested in, and then click through the albums to find the subalbums and photos.
This should be not too time consuming.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Jacob N. Breetvelt.

In my specific case the searcher always knows what model they’re searching on. The problem with them searching “XKE gearbox” is that they will also get results from an album like “The new model XYZ, with styling reminiscent of the XKE, features a sequential gearbox” which would be in a completely different section. I’m trying to avoid forcing them to do an iterative search for every search (It’s one thing to add more terms and search your results when you don’t start with a good search string, it’s another to do that for every single search).

Ideally I would like to give them a search box with a pulldown list, or a set of checkboxes which list only the top level albums. They can then pick a branch, enter their terms and get their info.

Even if the pulldown list of albums contained all of the albums, but showed the top level ones at the top of that list (rather than in order of the album-id as it is now) that would be a help.

Here is the page they’re used to: https://www.jag-lovers.org/snaps/

and the search looks like this: https://www.jag-lovers.org/snaps/snap_searcher.php

The photos have been that way since 1999. The problem is that it is all hand written, and stuck on an ancient version of php. My aim is to get the content over so that existing links to albums which we’ve already migrated (1.8 million posts going back to 1993) to our new forum platform (discourse). Once I get the content across I can give the users a much better platform to upload their photos to, but I need to get it right (in various ways) before I can move on to the next migration task.

Search selected Section has only 16 items in the selection box. Are these the top-level albums?

In my specific case the searcher always knows what model they’re searching on.

Are these the top-level albums?

If i add a top-level album selection box to the search widget, and make them the search root automaticly, this wold do it, but i understood earlier that you have thousands of top-level albums.

For the moment there are only those 16 top level albums. Yes, the model’s are lumped together at the moment (so all XKE albums are under “e-type”, xk120, xk140, and xk150 are all under “xk” etc).

It might go up to 50 or so, hard to tell.

Manually adding a cat to each top level, and adding them to the children is no problem for me (typical of your plugin that you can add, or overwrite!).

The test site only has a subset of the albums, but all of the top levels are represented by those 16.

So, if i had the possibility to restrict search to finding
‘albums with a certain category’
and/or
‘photos that are in albums with a certain category’
where the category is selectable in e selectionbox,
we would be there?

That would do fine.

I might codify the categories to avoid confusion with tags (i.e. category “e-type-albums” to avoid confusing them with a tag “e-type” which might occur elsewhere on the site), but that is a cosmetic thing.

I’ve already tagged all of the photos with the corresponding model tag during the .csv import, so it’s just a question of adding the cats to the top level albums and doing the inheritance, then having a search which allows the user to select cats

Will add option to have the category selectionbox on the normal photo search dialog.
Will be in 6.6.29, probably end of the week, maybe earlier in a beta version.

Pls install the current dev version: https://wppa.nl/docs-by-subject/development-version/

From the changelog:

= New Features =

* You can add an album category selectionbox in the photo search widget. There is not yet a shortcode argument analogon.