Add-On Releases - BoardTracker Search Mod v2 - a full search engine for your board!

BoardTracker Search Mod - Version 2

This search hack replaces the built in vb search with boardtracker search and results are fully integrated with your board. Search results can be threads from your board or all boards or a select group of boards - your choice!

Once installed, search from the search box on any page will pull results from boardtracker and display them within your board. 'Advanced Search' can still link to the existing vb search script or you can disable or restrict access to specific users (ie. admins, mods, paying members etc).

Results can be formated in any way you want with some simple template variables.

Options control panel allows you to easily switch the boardtracker search mod on or off so you can switch between boardtracker and vb search whenever you want.

The following configuration options/defaults exist:

Switch search on/off

Switch 'safe filter' on/off

Switch global search option on/off

Board ID - you can limit search to just your board, or several boards you choose or ALL boards indexed by boardtracker.

Category ID - you can define a category on boardtracker and searches will only pull results from that category.

Default Sort Order - you can sort results by relevancy or by post date.

Default Search Scope - results can be limited to last day, week, month, year or all time.

Default Search Query - a search term that will be executed whenever the boardtracker search script is called directly with no params.

Find Posts By User - replace the search links on user profiles and postbits.

Internal vB Search Allowed Usergroups - specify which usergroups are allowed to still use the built in vb search (search.php) and redirect all others to the bt search (searchbt.php). Leave empty to allow all users to still access search.php


User selections on the search form override the defaults.

The mod is very easy to install and consists of 1 php script to upload, 1 product xml file to install, 1 simple template edit plus some optional template edits. The xml product file creates one new template, an options panel and a few phrases.

You can see a demo here which has the search set to another board for demo purposes (since there are no actual posts on the demo board to search )

If your board is not yet indexed by BoardTracker, make sure to submit it!


## New features in version 2..

Search posts by username
Search in specific forums
Search in related forums
Search by boardtracker category
RSS feed and alerts for searches
Global search option
Works with bad words search filter
Block or restrict the built in search to specific usergroups
More integration with vb search links (such as from member profile)
More widgets in the control panel to play with



updates:
v2.0.1 - fixed small typo in one phrase setting
v2.0.2 - fixed bug in searchbt.php affecting some people. To upgrade, just upload the new searchbt.php, no other action required.
v2.0.3 - minor html change in templates - not a required upgrade
v2.0.4 - update to searchbt.php
v2.0.5 - small change to 'stopwords' in search_boardtracker template
v2.0.6 - added adv=1 to advanced search link (in plugin) to open search options automatically. Simplified navbar template edits (needed if installing tags mod also). Added 'search this forum' edits.
v2.0.7 - updated for new BoardTracker 2010. To upgrade, upload searchbt.php, install xml, minor template edits (param names)

[Erwin]

Good idea, but would be dependent on how quickly your bot spiders the posts? And it won't be able to spider private forums.

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by Yorixz

I'm wondering; will this actually return better search results than the default search, as I know, out of experience, that it doesn't really check for relevance but mainly just lists the hits, while search engines like Google check other (probably more important) things.

Yes. BoardTracker search returns relevant results. Much more relevant than internal search does. And much more so than google.

Originally Posted by Erwin

Good idea, but would be dependent on how quickly your bot spiders the posts? And it won't be able to spider private forums.

Indeed it is dependent of the crawler of BoardTracker. But this is much more timely and accurate than one might imagine. Threads are detected very accurately and efficiently. Most threads are indexed less than an hour after creation. In cases of busy forums, this is many times even more frequent.
BoardTracker can index private/hidden forums, but that requires the board administrator to ask for that specifically.

[BoardTracker]

A couple of minor additions..

You can make the search page open the advanced options automatically by adding adv=1 to the link. For example if you use the hardcoded searchbt.php link on the 'advanced search' link in the little dropdown search box on every page which is in the navbar template.

The new link would look like: searchbt.php?adv=1

If you are using the dynamic method rather than just hardcoding the advanced search link in the template then you just need to edit the url in the "Restrict vbsearch to certain usergroups" plugin. Just open that and change this line..

header("Location: http://$bt_host$bt_uri/searchbt.php");

to this..

header("Location: http://$bt_host$bt_uri/searchbt.php?adv=1");

You can also make 'search this forum' link/form work directly also..

Open the FORUMDISPLAY template..

Find..

<form action="search.php?do=process" method="post">

Replace with..

<form action="searchbt.php" method="get">

Find..

<a href="search.php?$session[sessionurl]f=$forumid" rel="nofollow">$vbphrase[advanced_search]</a>

Replace with..

<a href="searchbt.php?$session[sessionurl]frm=$forumid&adv=1" rel="nofollow">$vbphrase[advanced_search]</a>

Find..

<input type="hidden" name="do" value="process" />
<input type="hidden" name="forumchoice[]" value="$forumid" />
<input type="hidden" name="childforums" value="1" />
<input type="text" class="bginput" name="query" size="20" style="width:175px" />

Replace with..

<input type="hidden" name="frm" value="$forumid" />
<input type="text" class="bginput" name="search" size="20" style="width:175px" />

[BoardTracker]

Version 2.0.6 released which includes the updates mentioned in the previous post plus simplified navbar template edits which will make it easier to add navbar edits required by our tags mod.

[soletrader]

Is it possible to place inside a vbadvanced module?

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by soletrader

Is it possible to place inside a vbadvanced module?

What exactly is a vbadvanced module?

[soletrader]

Check my site index at www.traderslaboratory.com

The navigation on the left, the skype on the right, the new articles in the middle, the welcome to traders laboratory box in the center are all examples of modules. I would like to bring the tags on my site index so would be a nice idea to stick it in a module.

[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by soletrader

Check my site index at www.traderslaboratory.com

The navigation on the left, the skype on the right, the new articles in the middle, the welcome to traders laboratory box in the center are all examples of modules. I would like to bring the tags on my site index so would be a nice idea to stick it in a module.

You refer to the tags mod...
It's very simple..
If you have the tags mod installed, you can use a very simple javascript to place a tagcloud whereever you want, even the index page. You can then visually format it it anyway you want.

As described here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=128642

<!-- Tag Cloud -->
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tr>
<td class="tcat">$vbphrase[bt_tag_cloud]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="alt1" align="center">
<script type="text/javascript" language=Javascript src="http://www.boardtracker.com/cloud/js/?board={$vbulletin->options['bt_tag_boardid']}&items=20&smallsize=6&bigsize=20&hot=e01010&cold=4090a0&days=90&linktype={$vbulletin->options['bt_tag_link_type']}"></script>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- End Tag Cloud -->

Configuring the following items in the script link: &items=, &smallsize=, &bigsize=, &hot=, &cold= and &days= you can decide exactly how you want the tag cloud to look like

I hope in answers the question.

[BoardTracker]

Make sure to also check out our very cool thread tagging and tag search system for vb3.6 here!

It allows your members to tag threads and provides a fully integrated search engine - similar in appearance to this mod - which also shows a tag cloud and related tags and provides advanced seach options.

Tag links can use mod_rewrite or standard links and there's lots of options to play with in the control panel. Your tag cloud can easily be put on any page you want - even on other sites!

Tags are stored locally in your db as well as indexed by boardtracker and again all the heavy work of searching is handled by our servers!

[TRR]

I really like this search engine, but I really dislike that when users click the "New Posts" link in the Navbar, it redirects to a search page and doesn't display posts that the user has not yet read. This is one of my board's most used features so I had to disable boardtracker search so that my users could have the "New Posts" link work the way it is supposed to. Is there an easy fix for this? I really want to turn boardtracker back on...