SearchGuide

The following guide will explain the function of the Search module and how to use it.

What is the Search Module?

The Search module allows you and visitors to your site to quickly and easily search for specific pages on your phpWebSite. The Search module is a powerful tool that ignores overly common words but allows you to clip words specifically to certain pages so that they come up when that word is searched for. It is a quick and easy way to manage searches and allow visitors to find the pages they are looking for.

How do you use the Search Module?

The Search module automatically puts a search bar at the top of each page. To use it, simply type in a key word for the page you are looking for and your results will be returned. There are however several features to the Search module that make it much more useful.

  • Ignores common words - Words that are commonly used through out your website will be ignored by the search and by default return no results. This prevents a search from returning every (or almost) every page on the website.
  • Clip words to pages - Of course, just because a word is common doesn't mean there aren't one or more specific pages that should be found when someone searches for them. For instance if someone searched Electronic Student Services on the ESS site with out the search ignoring common words, every page would return as having Electronic Student Services some where. Clearly though, there are pages that should come up with this search, such as a page listing what electronic student services are offered by ESS. The site administrator would want to clip Electronic Student Services to each page like that.

Words are ignored by default when they are found to be common, however you are also able to add words to the ignore list or add search terms to pages through the Search module. To access the Search module go to your Control Panel and then your Administration tab. From there click on the Search icon.

http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/images/wiki/Search1.png

In the Search module you will see three tabs; Keywords, Ignore and Settings. The first tab is the Keywords tab. This tab will show you all searches that have been attempted on your site. These results were attempted search, just because they show up here does not mean they returned any results. You can then delete these words from the list, add them to the ignore list or Clip Word. If you Clip Word you can then go to a specific page and use the clipboard to clip the word onto the page so that it will be returned as a result whenever a user searches with that term.

http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/images/wiki/Search2.png

The second tab is the Ignore tab. Here you can view any words you have specifically set to be ignored by the search module. You can choose to delete or allow these words in your searches. (Note: These are just the words you have chosen to ignore. The search function automatically chooses common words and ignores them by default so that there are not too many search results returned.)

http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/images/wiki/Search3.png

The final tab is the Settings tab. Which allows you to check if you want to show alternate options or not.

Permissions

All modules have a set of permissions that can be set to allow a user/user group or users/user groups to have different access to each module. These options are available through the User Administration module and you can learn more about permissions in the Permissions Guide. The Search module allows you to give users none or unrestricted permission. If users are given unrestricted permission, they will be able to have full access to the module the same as you do as the site administrator. If they are given no permission, they will not be able to modify the module.

Return to the Administration Guide.

Return to the User Documentation main page.


Last modified 05/06/2008 01:00:57 PM by Matt McNaney

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