Spice up your internal sNews CMS search page with result descriptions

Jun 3rd, 2009 at 9:28 am
filed under: sNews CMS / Hacks & Mods
Comments (10)

Here is a very simple way to add a nice extra touch to your internal sNews search results, by adding the meta description below each entry title. If you've ever noticed when doing a Google search, they will put the page's meta description just below the search title. This hack is super simple.


Step 1) As always, BACK-UP your snews.php file and work off a copy. Now find the function search and paste the two (scroll over if needed) following highlighted code snippets in the corresponding places;

$Or_id = implode(' OR ',$Or_id);
$query = 'SELECT
        title,a.seftitle AS asef,a.date AS date,
        c.name AS name,c.seftitle AS csef,
        x.name AS xname,x.seftitle AS xsef,a.description_meta AS description
    FROM '._PRE.'articles'.' AS a
    LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as c
        ON category = c.id
    LEFT OUTER JOIN '._PRE.'categories'.' as x
        ON c.subcat =  x.id
    WHERE '.$Or_id;
$result = mysql_query($query);
while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $date = date(s('date_format'), strtotime($r['date']));
    if ($r['name']) $name = ' ('.$r['name'].')';
    if (isset($r['xsef']))  $link = $r['xsef'].'/'.$r['csef'].'/';
    else $link = isset($r['csef']) ? $r['csef'].'/' : '';
    echo '<p><a href="'._SITE.$link.$r['asef'].'/">'.$r['title'].$name.'</a> - '.$date.'<br />'.$r['description'].'</p>';

And boom goes the dynamite, you're done, and your results should now look something like below :)

Search meta descriptions
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rated 5/5 (3 votes)

sNews, search, hacks

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10 comments

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#1
Poppoll Poppoll said:
Jun 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm

Thanks Matt
PP


#2
Vic Vic said:
Jun 4th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

Yay, finally! Thanks :-)


#3
Matt Matt said:
Jun 4th, 2009 at 7:11 pm

lol Vic :)

Almost too easy, huh? Soon, I'll also explain how to do the same in the tagsearch function in case someone can't figure it out.


#4
Sven - Philippe Sven - Philippe said:
Jun 11th, 2009 at 2:47 am

Excellent! Bravo!


#5
toolman toolman said:
Jun 22nd, 2009 at 5:28 am

Simply and nice :D
Good work, again ;)

One question. How to sort search results by Categories/Titles not by ID?
For example:

catA
- artAB
- artBA
catB
- artAB
- artCC

I have many same titles in different categories and standard sorting not looking fine.


#6
Matt Matt said:
Jun 23rd, 2009 at 7:16 am

Toolman, personally, my search function is all hacked up and uses MySQL full-text search to return ranked results, but for what you're asking, you can do this.

On a default snews.php, function search, look for

$query = $query.' ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT '.$limit;

and change it to

$query = $query.' ORDER BY c.id DESC LIMIT '.$limit;

that will order by the category ids, not the article ids.


#7
Patric Patric said:
Jan 25th, 2010 at 9:34 am

A goodie one... Thanks.


#8
Tina Tina said:
Apr 7th, 2010 at 6:22 pm

nice, thank you matt :)


#9
Tina Tina said:
Apr 7th, 2010 at 6:42 pm

Hi Matt,
just thinking a bit afterwards. you know what would be nice to have ... a paging function for the searchresults, so that you can get all results, instead of just the predifined limit. I know it's probably not in your interest at the moment, since you have a different search engine implemented here, but if you ever have "nothing to do" (lol) ...


#10
Matt Matt said:
Apr 8th, 2010 at 7:26 am

Yeah, the default search for sNews is quite limited, hence my use of Sphider.

Adding pagination shouldn't be *too hard*. I will add it to the list of requests, if I ever do manage to get some free time. :)


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