Alessandro Melandri » PHP http://www.melandri.net J2EE Developer & Photography enthusiast Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Add a category filter to WordPress search form http://www.melandri.net/2009/08/05/add-a-category-filter-to-wordpress-search-form/ http://www.melandri.net/2009/08/05/add-a-category-filter-to-wordpress-search-form/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 07:06:41 +0000 amelandri http://www.melandri.net/?p=236 WordPress has a simple function to build a search form for your blog and in this tutorial I’ll show you how to add a category filter to it.

<?php get_search_form(); ?>

This function will look for a file called searchform.php inside your template folder: if it doesn’t exist it will output the standard search form. So, if it isn’t already in place, create your custom searchform.php and copy into it the default search form output. It should look similar to this:

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>">
  <div>
    <label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
    <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" />
    <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
  </div>
</form>

We want to add a select box to let the user search in a specific category or in all categories: to achive this we’ll use another default WordPress function.

The wp_dropdown_categories function will build for you a select box with all your categories. Take a look at the documentation for all available options.

<?php wp_dropdown_categories( 'show_option_all=All Categories' ); ?>
 
<!-- This is a sample output of the function -->
 
<select name='cat' id='cat' class='postform' >
  <option value='0' selected='selected'>All Categories</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="1">Uncategorized</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="3">HTML &amp; CSS</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="4">Java</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="5">Links</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="6">Linux</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="9">Javascript</option>
  <option class="level-0" value="32">XML</option>
</select>

Now add the category select box to the form modifying your searchform.php like this:

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('siteurl'); ?>">
  <div>
    <label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
    <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" /> 
    in <?php wp_dropdown_categories( 'show_option_all=All Categories' ); ?> 
    <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
  </div>
</form>

That’s it. It just works out of the box.

A finishing touch

Now that you have a nice category filter in your search form it would be great to modify the search result page and add something like Search result for “foo” in category “bar”.
Well, it’s quite easy: we need do add a simple function to the function.php file. Remember that every function in this file will be automatically available in your theme.

This is a simple function that gets the cat parameter from the request and if it’s not null it searches the category name. It has two input parameters so you can pass two strings to be displayed before and after the category name. If cat is null or empty or “0″ (All categories) it will return an empty string.

function getCatSearchFilter($pre,$post){
 
  $category = "";
  $catId = htmlspecialchars($_GET["cat"]);
  if ($catId != null && $catId != '' && $catId != '0'){
    $category = $pre.get_cat_name($catId).$post;
  }
  return $category;
}

Now open you search.php, add the function call to the page and you are done:

<h1>Search Results for <?php echo(get_search_query());?><?php echo(getCatSearchFilter(' in category ',''));?></h1>
]]> http://www.melandri.net/2009/08/05/add-a-category-filter-to-wordpress-search-form/feed/ 7 Setup a LAMP server on Ubuntu http://www.melandri.net/2009/05/28/setup-a-lamp-server-on-ubuntu/ http://www.melandri.net/2009/05/28/setup-a-lamp-server-on-ubuntu/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 07:23:34 +0000 amelandri http://localhost/blog/?p=19 These are the steps to install an Apache-MySQL-PHP server on an Ubuntu desktop machine.

# Install Apache 2
sudo apt-get install apache2
 
#Install PHP5
sudo apt-get install php5
 
#Install MySQL
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
 
#Install MySQL for Apache
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
 
#Install PHP MySQL Support
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
 
#Restart Apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Managing Apache

Web files must be placed in ”/var/www/”.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Managing MySql

sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start
sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld restart
]]> http://www.melandri.net/2009/05/28/setup-a-lamp-server-on-ubuntu/feed/ 0