Implementation of Zoom Pro with Wordpress and content from HTML files - how?

[bjornarfjelldal]

Hi!

We are setting up a Wordpress site where we, among other things than Wordpress are useful for (posts, forums, generally as a CMS) want to display and have searchable certain autogenerated .html files/reports that we in some way or other embed into the overall structure of the site. Having tried almost every possible search tool, our last (and best?) chance looks like it might be Zoom, and we have bought the Pro version.

The challenge is in how we embed / display these .html files (i.e. with its own css), given that the default (and extended by certain payable plugins) search only searches through what is stored explicitly in posts, from the database.

Embedding .html files in different ways (iframe, embed, php include) is a design challenge we face, but the bigger one so far is how to have a search for both the "normal" setup of Wordpress in addition to these .html reports. By using Zoom default in spider mode on the root of the webpage, it naturally only scrapes through visible links, but do find any of the content embeded/framed/included otherwise. It does find results from php include of .html files, but not in a satisfactory way design-wise, as the html inside the include does not apply its own css.

Does anybody have a suggestion on how to tackle this? Any tips on how to include these .html files/reports differently (they will be auto updated on the FTP server regularly)?
Can we use Zoom both on the root but also on the file directory of these files and somewhat redirect the search hits back to the .html-files inside the Wordpress theme?

BR

Bjørnar

[Ray]

A few things to note.

The challenge is in how we embed / display these .html files (i.e. with its own css), given that the default (and extended by certain payable plugins) search only searches through what is stored explicitly in posts, from the database.

There are no payable plugins. All plugins are free and as of V7, they work with every edition of the software (including the Free Edition).

Embedding .html files in different ways (iframe, embed, php include) is a design challenge we face, but the bigger one so far is how to have a search for both the "normal" setup of Wordpress in addition to these .html reports. By using Zoom default in spider mode on the root of the webpage, it naturally only scrapes through visible links, but do find any of the content embeded/framed/included otherwise. It does find results from php include of .html files, but not in a satisfactory way design-wise, as the html inside the include does not apply its own css.

It's hard to get a full idea of what's going on from your description alone.

However, one approach you may want to consider is to use Offline Mode to index the HTML files on your local drive, and use the "Rewrite Links" feature (under "Configure"->"Indexing options") to change the URLs so that they point to the iframe/embed/php version of the page you require.

For example, if your embedded/styled pages are named something like:

mystyleframe.php?page1.html

Then you can index the folder containing "page1.html" (say, "mycontentfiles/page1.html") and use the Rewrite Links feature with settings:
Find in URL: /mycontentfiles/
Replace with: /mystyleframe.php?

Take a look at the Help file or Users Guide for more examples.

[bjornarfjelldal]

Hi, Ray - and thanks for your swift reply!

I was not referring to Zoom plugins - but other search plugins for wordpress, some of which are payable

Regarding our setup, perhaps this little snapshot explains it more;



Where the bottom part is a .html page embeded/iframed into the solution, with its own css and so on. This file will be autoupdated, thus we cannot (?) use a normal wordpress post as I do not find any means of autoupdating its content to i.e. display changes in a support system. Some testing finds that including it with php include makes Zoom find the content on the site when crawling, however we loose the oportunity to have our own css inside the wordpress theme's own style.css.

One solution can be to, for these certain pages, to use the Rewrite links functionality, yes. I will check that out. We are still in the building phase of all this functionality, so if you have input that would for instance improve how Zoom handles the content (as search is the most important functionality overall) please let me know!

[hcdl]

I have the zoom search working as a CGI and set XML/RSS output. I created a shortcode in Wordpress that calls the search.cgi with the desired GET parameters and use PHP to process the returned XML and output to the webpage the shortcode is in. This way your Wordpress theme's CSS controls the look. Because the CGI is set to XML/RSS output you will also need to create your own form to get user search input.