Changing the properties of the Categories box

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to change the properties of the "category" and/or "number of searches per page" boxes, such as size, background colour, font size, etc?

Also, can the text inside the search form be altered in any way?

Cheers

[David]

To start with have a look at these two FAQ questions,

Q. How do I customize the appearance of my search page with CSS?

Q. How do I modify the appearance of the search form?

Then have a look at the complete list of the CSS class names used, refer to Chapter 5.6 of our PDF Users Guide.

You can modify the text that appears on the search page and search results, by customizing the Zoom Language Files (.ZLANG files). Almost every bit of text on the search page can be modified or translated, including “Search results for…” and “x results found”, etc. This allows you to translate the search page to the language of your choice, without having to modify the search script.

Zoom also comes with a few pre-translated language files which both serve as examples, and allow you to create French or German search pages straight out of the box, by selecting it from the dropdown menu.

For more information on how to create your own translations, please refer to chapter 6.2, “Translating the search page” of the Users guide.

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David

[Anonymous]

Replacing quotation marks

Modified my Zoom engine and it looks excellent. But there are two things that I still do not know how to change:

1) In the search results heading, how do I remove the quotation marks from the category and place them around the user's chosen search word? For example, change this: Search results for: mobile phones in "your category" to this: Search results for: "mobile phones" in your category.

2) How can I increase the space between Category: and the category box? And the Search for: and the search box, etc?

Thanks

[Ray]

Re: Replacing quotation marks

1) In the search results heading, how do I remove the quotation marks from the category and place them around the user's chosen search word? For example, change this: Search results for: mobile phones in "your category" to this: Search results for: "mobile phones" in your category.

We don't have quotation marks around the search word for a reason - there is an important distinction when a user's query contains quotation marks, as it is then treated as an exact phrase. If a user searches for:

"star wars" robots

Then you wouldn't want it to appear like:

Search results for: ""star wars" robots"

So we don't really recommend this change. But nonetheless, if you really want, you can modify the ZLANG file to do so. See the references given above regarding translating the search page. Something like the following changes should work:

STR_RESULTS_FOR=Search results for "
STR_RESULTS_IN_CATEGORY=" in category

Getting quotation marks around the category name is a little more difficult. You can modify your category names to actually contain quotation marks - that would be the easiest way. An alternative is to modify the search script, but this is generally not recommended for such a minor change.

2) How can I increase the space between Category: and the category box? And the Search for: and the search box, etc?

You can insert some non-breaking spaces for the corresponding text entries in the ZLANG file. For example,

STR_FORM_CATEGORY=Category

You could also create your own search form all together and make it appear however you like. See this FAQ:
Q. How do I define my own search form?

[Anonymous]

Very helpful thank you Ray.

Cheers