Customized Search Results Page - Lite Commerce

[WilliamJ]

Hi,

We are using a commercial shopping cart software called Lite Commerce and it has a built-in PHP search engine which works OK but is very slow because it is actually searching a dynamic MySQL database. The program does build an identical static HTML version of the entire store but their search engine will not search the HTML pages. While this may seem OK the problem with it is that it displays PHP LINKS and this takes the customer off of the faster HTML pages and into the slower PHP pages. Our site doesn't change that often so we can generate the static HTML pages once and do incremental updates without too much difficulty.

What I was wondering was if there is any way to customize Zoom (I am using V5) program or the search results to search the HTML pages and have the search results formatted in a sort of store format rather than the default informational format. In other words, have the search results display only certain information and in a certain format: Price, Short Description, URL Link, and perhaps the Image. Sort of like an AMAZON.COM search result.

The default search engine with the store puts priority on certain field data like size and price. If we use the default Zoom engine, the price and size are highlighted and are actually formatted as a link. Wondering if we can do something similar with Zoom.

Thank you.

[David]

Assuming all your HTML pages are linked together, it is no problem for Zoom to search just the HTML pages and ignore all PHP pages.

The problem is that when you search a SQL database, all the data is neatly arranged into fields. But when you search HTML you get unstructured data. For example if a number like, 2010, is found on a web page, then Zoom (and all other search engines) will have a hard time know if this is a price, a post code, the product weight, the product size, the number of items in stock, a model number, etc...

So it is hard to pull data like price and size out of a web page. But easy to pull it from SQL.

We have a solution for this in V6 in Zoom which may or may not work on your site. The solution is to use Custom Meta Fields.

Custom Meta Fields allow you to specify arbitrary meta fields to be indexed and made search-able. For example, index and search on a real estate website, by "Number of bedrooms", "Suburb", "Price", "Property type", etc. This is a big feature as it effectively means you can build simple custom databases with a multi criteria search using Zoom without actually having a database. See the Fruits-R-Us demo site for an example of this in action.

This requires meta data on your pages like this,
<meta name="TYPE" content="Fruit">
<meta name="PRICE" content="0.65">

And there's a tutorial here which goes through in detail how this demo site was setup. We recommend looking at these two links in conjunction with the V6 Help file if you want to use custom meta fields.

Having an image with each search result is also possible.

[WilliamJ]

Customized Search Results

Thank you.

Yes, I think that would work but it would require the addition of several meta name code lines for each product page and with hundreds of HTML pages, a very daunting task. I will have to think about this some more to see if I can get this automated.

There might be a way for me to insert the HTML "head" code somewhere in the SQL database. We use Excel and CSV to upload the data and if I can figure out how to get it into the page, it would work very well for our needs.

[WilliamJ]

Meta Tags Version 6

Hi again.

I looked through the tutorial and I think these new meta tags will work if I can put these in the body of the HTML rather than the head and put them in as hidden fields.

The Lite Commerce software allows for customized fields but it has no way of putting these in the HEAD area - It will put them in the BODY.

If I can get ZOOM 6 to search the BODY for these new META tags, I can probably get it to work for our needs.

With literally hundreds of HTML pages, we can't go page by page but we can automate the task using EXCEL and importing via CSV.

If you think I can configure ZOOM 6 to look for these tags in the BODY area please advise how I can get a BETA copy to try.

Thank you.

[Ray]

The Lite Commerce software allows for customized fields but it has no way of putting these in the HEAD area - It will put them in the BODY.

If I can get ZOOM 6 to search the BODY for these new META tags, I can probably get it to work for our needs.

Meta tags, by requirement of W3C HTML Standards, must be within the HEAD tags of a HTML page. Zoom complies with this, so META tags outside of the HEAD tags are ignored, unless no HEAD tags were found at all on the page.

Having said that, we have come across more and more limited content management systems (CMS) or website authoring packages which are restricting their users in a manner such that this is limiting.

We might discuss this through and consider a toggleable option to changing this behaviour. But for the sake of compliancy with HTML standards, it would be better to pursue a solution which allows you to add the META tags where they belong (within the HEAD tags). Your CMS/authoring package should not be limiting you in such a manner that you are forced to break HTML standards compliancy.

If you think I can configure ZOOM 6 to look for these tags in the BODY area please advise how I can get a BETA copy to try.

Download links and more information on the V6 beta can be found in this forum:
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=9

[WilliamJ]

Customized Search Results

As a follow-up, I was able to get the results page almost the way we need it (with Version 5) by using the META TITLE and META DESCRIPTION. We certainly can use the extra META FIELDS capability you have with Version 6 but would have to get our shopping cart software modified to make use of the extra fields.

You can have a look at an example of our results page here
http://www.georgiagrindingwheel.com/cgi-bin/search_cart/search.cgi?zoom_query=pink&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_a nd=1&zoom_sort=0

Will be watching for the final release of Version 6 and will get our cart modified at that time to use the new meta fields.