Webme Plugins
Posted Jul 29th, 2009 by ConorI have been doing a bit of work on some Webme plugins recently. All of the plugins I have been working on are available for download in the webworks-webme SVN and live on the Monaghan Medical Centre website.
Dynamic Search Plugin
The dynamic search plugin enables you to search different sections of your website dynamically. You can choose between searching Site Wide or a selection of categories. You can add catagories in the admin area. A catagory must be a pagename and the plugin will search that page and all sub pages. The plugin also keeps a record of the most popular searches and displays a link to them on the main search page.
The entire plugin is written in both PHP and jQuery. The PHP end acts as a backup for the javascript end. It also allows you to use your own search form to display results from this plugin, as I have done on the MMC site.
Mailing List Plugin
This is a plugin that I released a while ago but I have made a few changes recently. Previously there was PHP form validation which replaced the form itself if you made a mistake. The problem with that was, depending on the setup of your website, it might not work layout wise. Thats why I have replaced it with a nice jQuery alert, similar to the one I am using on Furasta. The changes aren’t large enough to release a new version but I have updated the SVN and supplied a new download link.
News Plugin
I wrote this plugin trying my best to make it compatible with the Dynamic Search plugin. If you want to create a news page then you just choose news as the page type. To add a new news item you simply create a new subpage of the news page. If you look at the News page in the frontend it will show a summary of all the news items. It is a very simple plugin which has no database, only 4 files and features pagated results. You can also search the News section easily using the Dynamic Search plugin.
I also did quite a lot of work on a Music Store plugin which works similar to the iTunes Store. The plugin is not live yet but it will be soon and in the end I decided not to release it, for the moment anyway, because it gets very complicated when dealing with paypal access details. If anyone wants a copy for it, at a price, I can tailor it for your exact needs.
I was wondering exactly how the search page would show itself. One thing that would be nice if, when entering values into the search box itself, a quick search was done on the server and a small list of results shown below the box as you type.
You’d need to make sure the search pauses a moment while you type before firing itself off, to make sure your system is not suddenly bogged down by search requests.
Yeah that would be good. I will make sure to include that next time I write an update.