Searching Single Pages with Dynamic Content

Question

I have a slight problem I have been trying to address for a client I have been working with. We have 4 sets of single pages that are loading content from a database using PHP based upon a get string that is provided. These pages that are generated are optimized well for SEO and have alt tags for images and Content that we need to be able to search using a search feature.

Now i had assumed (An everyone knows what assuming gets you) that these pages by default would be able to be searched by the concrete 5 built in search feature. But it doesn't work. If I search for a word that I know is definitely on one of these pages even multiple times no results are found.

How can I make Concrete5 search these pages. If its no do able by a default or by a plugin, then can someone please offer some advice on how to fix this. This is an important feature and must be completed.

EDIT: See my comment below. I still need some help or direction here as CSE inst much of an option. EDIT2: It may be viable for me to install a crawler and a custom search engine to address my problems. I was thinking of spider. Any other suggestions on that or other options are much appreciated!

Answer 1

Unfortunately C5 doesn't provide a way to do this -- the only way to tap into the search index is with blocks. And even if you created a phony block just to pass content from the single_page through to the search index, there's no way to say that some content is from one URL while other content is from another URL (which you'd need to do since your single_page controller is handling many different URL's).

I don't know of a way to achieve what you want to do (and it appears that nobody else does either -- http://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/customizing_c5/make-content-in-single-pages-searchable/ ), other than building your own internal search engine.

EDIT: I just did some digging, and thought that perhaps you could manually insert records into the PageSearchIndex table and specify the searchable content and the desired path there -- but this won't work because it relies on one cID (collection id, a.k.a. page id) per entry -- so you'd only be able to insert one record for the top-level single_page path.

I think the simplest solution here would be to create your own searching infrastructure for your single_pages (like some kind of function in the controller that would return an array of page paths and searchable content for each one), then override the search block and perform an additional search of your single_page -- then combine the results on the search results page there. Or just use google site search for your site, which will actually crawl the pages and hence find your various single_page urls: https://www.google.com/cse/

Best of luck.

Answer 2

I have not tested this, but maybe you can put a function getSearchableContent() in the single pages controller like you do for blocks. This would return the string to be searched. Would look something like this:

function getSearchableContent() {
    // ... compose searchstring depending on the queried content.
    return $searchstring;
}

But I don't know if this works for dynamic content. If not, I'd look into C5's search index core classes and try to extend them for your project.