We have many installations where I work, some of them newer, some older, some severely whacked at by coders, some pretty much default installations.
Anyhow, now they want a page from which a visitor could enter a search term, click submit, and get results from all of the separate applications!
Here is my solution:
The new page has your basic self submitting form:
<form action=”" method=”post”>
<label for=”search”>Search:</label>
<input name=”s” type=”text” value=”" />
<input type=”submit” />
</form>
Then, of course, it grabs what has been submitted:
<?php
/**
* Get Search parameters
*/
$search = $_POST['s'];
$search = str_replace(” “,”%20″,$search);
echo $search;
?>
This checks to ensure that the user didn’t submit nothing (as WordPress would give us every post as currently coded…! ick). This would also be a great place to guard against injection attacks (or in the last step of course), to filter what may be searched for, etc., but I’ll leave those concerns for another discussion:
<?php
/**
* If desired search is NOT empty, search, otherwise don’t
*/
if(($search != ”) && ($search != null) && (!empty($search)) )
{
?>
Now we curl in the results from each installation:
<?php
/**
* Get Search results from WP app 1
*/
$sub_req_url = “http://YOURAPP1URLHERE/searchpage.php?s=” . $search;
$ch = curl_init($sub_req_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$podcast_return = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $podcast_return;
/**
* End
*/
?>
<?php
/**
* Get Search results from WP app 2
*/
$sub_req_url = “http://YOURAPP2URLHERE/searchpage.php?s=” . $search;
$ch = curl_init($sub_req_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$podcast_return = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $podcast_return;
/**
* End
*/
?>
Now let’s close our IF block, and maybe provide ELSE if we want to…
<?php
/**
* close if empty block
*/
}
else
{
}
?>
Ok, that’s the end of our new page, again, I’ll leave formatting of the results and the rest of the page to another discussion. Now let’s make the above mentioned search pages “searchpage.php” (make one for EACH APP, lives in the ROOT of EACH WP installation that we’re searching!):
<?php
/**
* WordPress App 1 Post Results Pull-In
*/
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES‘, true);
include(‘wp-load.php’ );
$query = new WP_Query(‘s=’ . $_GET['s']);
if ($query->have_posts()) : while ($query->have_posts()) : $query->the_post(); ?>
/* Again, how you choose to skin the results could be implemented here, but I’ll leave that up to you… */
<div id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>“>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<div>
<?php the_content(‘<p>Read the rest of this page »</p>‘); ?>
<?php wp_link_pages(array(‘before’ => ‘<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ‘, ‘after’ => ‘</p>‘, ‘next_or_number’ => ‘number’)); ?>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
Whoohoo! Great Work!