Zoom & Wordpress. Is it compatible?

[garyglabwell]

Hey,

I recently had a great website designed and developed for me by webites perth and i was wondering how i could integrate the Zoom Search Engine into it? Is there an APi or anything available or even a wordpress plugin?

As i have taken over the management of the website, i don't want to ask them as they will charge me so any help would be highly appreciated.

cheers guys

[David]

See this FAQ
Q. How to create a search engine for your WordPress website

[kpa]

As chance would have it I was just exploring this very subject and setting up a WP site to test it. At the risk of stating the obvious would it be correct to say that the ZOOM plugin for WP only supports ZOOM indexes output for the PHP platform (I have a really good CGI thing going with ZOOM but for all intents it looks like I'm reindexing for PHP as best I can tell)..

[David]

There is no technical reason it needs to be this way, but if you have Wordpress, then it is pretty sure PHP is available. But a lot less sure that CGI is.

CGI is also very hard for some of these Wordpress users (and their hosting companies) to get their heads around.

[kpa]

Thanks guys - the basis for my post was that I was asummunig that the WP ZOOM Plugin looks for (or is configured for) search.php rather than search.cgi - I have a cgi based zoom site running OK but was looking for a nice way to wrap the site and WP is so dam easy and elegant. It then occured to me that your WP plugin might provide a nice degree if integartion and make my life even simpler.

[kpa]

Hope readers find this useful - I have to say I'm quite stoked - thought I'd test the WP plugin and after quite a bit of experimenting I have it working and just the way I want it to. This is my test site:

http://theretrosearch.com/wp/zoom-te...om_query=trs80

or try

http://theretrosearch.com/wp/zoom-te...om_query=color

What's significant about this is that its using the CGI version of ZOOM having succesfully pointed it away from the default search.php - it appears stable and robust but I have some more testing to do. The instructions on the ZOOM site are predicated on using ZOOM to index your WP site but you might note from the results here that I'm not doing that. I'm just using a little 50 page index from another site for testing here so I could quickly change parameters for testing if need be. The target project is about 45,000 pages.

I stripped everything out of search_template.html and the output inherited the style from the WP site so thats made my life a bit simpler.

The only outstanding issue I've got is that I'm using advanced template tags to control the output, however, its not recognising ZOOM_SHOW_HEADING at this stage and I'm not sure why - I'll keep digging. Hmmm - I stand corrected - I just retyped the tags in search_template.html and that fixed it (I suspect a bad character from copying and pasting from the help).

Hope this helps garyglabwell

[Ray]

Thanks for sharing your experience, kpa!
Glad to see you've got it running well on your site.