SEF / SEO search for your sNews website

Here's a nifty mod for your sNews CMS, or any website really, this is one of the easier mods and should be done for any sNews install in my opinion. This mod will take your search form's search_query variable and reformat it to a sexy (aka SEF) URI.

This will make it easy for your visitors to bookmark searches and also to use Google Analytics to set up a filter to see what folks are searching for... more on the Google Analytics filter later, let's get rolling on the mod.

To try it out, simply look to your right, my search engine now uses this mod.

<!--IMPORTANT!
Please note that if your website uses non-ASCII characters, this likely won't work for you.
END IMPORTANT!-->

As always, back up your snews.php file and work on a copy. Now around line 72 add the following code just above the function s():

//Rewrite the search
if (isset($_POST['search_query'])) {
// Get the POST search query and clean it up
$squery = strip_tags(strtolower(cleanXSS($_POST['search_query'])));
$squery = preg_replace("/\s\s+/", " ", $squery);
$squery = trim($squery);

    // If there's anything left, we'll redirect to a SEF URI
    if ($squery != '') {
        header( 'Location: '._SITE.'search/'.urlencode($squery).'/' );
        exit;
    }
}

OK, now around line 118, we need to add search to the SEF hardcoded links or else it'll throw a 404 header, now find

$l['cat_listSEF'] = 'archive,contact,sitemap,login,administration,admin_category,admin_article,article_new,extra_new,page_new,snews_categories,snews_articles,extra_contents,snews_pages,snews_settings,snews_files,logout,groupings,admin_groupings';

add then add search to the list, like below:

$l['cat_listSEF'] = 'archive,contact,search,sitemap,login,administration,admin_category,admin_article,article_new,extra_new,page_new,snews_categories,snews_articles,extra_contents,snews_pages,snews_settings,snews_files,logout,groupings,admin_groupings';

Now around line 529, within the function center(), insert the new code below the globals:

global $categorySEF, $subcatSEF, $articleSEF;
    // begin new code
    $url = explode('/',clean(cleanXSS($_GET['category'])));
    if ($url[0] == "search") {
        $search_query = $url[1];
    }
    // end new code

Now around line 543, still within the function center(), find the following code:

case isset($_POST['search_query']):
    search(); return; break;

Now CHANGE the code to:

case isset($search_query):
    search($search_query); return; break;

Almost done!, now find the function search() around line 1457, locate the following lines:

//SEARCH ENGINE
function search($limit = 20) {
    $search_query = clean(cleanXSS($_POST['search_query']));

Now CHANGE the code to:

//SEARCH ENGINE
function search($search_query,$limit = 100) {
    $search_query = clean(cleanXSS($search_query));

That's it, now upload your snews.php file and give it a go. As always, no warranties, I'm not responsible for you breaking anything with my code :P, but please let me know if you have any problems and I'll do my best to assist you.