I’d like to share my experience using Live Search 1.5.3, which I purchased today for $14.99, and installed onto Joe Workman’s Foundation theme and Sitelok stacks, using RW 7.4.1.
Goal
To add a reliable, Sitelok-stacks compatible, site-wide search function that requires minimal setup.
Findings
With Sitelok users logged out:
The menu disappears.
Search results that appear when users are logged in do not appear when logged out.
With Sitelok users logged in:
The menu reappears.
Search results do appear, but in white text against a white background. Adjustments to text and background colour options in ‘Search Result Options’ do not resolve the white-on-white issue.
When viewing a page in Preview mode with Live Search installed, a message (that apparently cannot be turned off) appears, pushing down all content (see Fig. 1).
If you want a serious “pro” level site search consider ZOOM search engine. You pay for the features but with my 1500 page site I needed a great search tool and ZOOM fills every need. Lot’s of customization and options. It’s a php script that integrates with any web site, including RW built sites. Install on your server and then configure and run your site indexes in any browser. Indexing is extremely fast.
@1611mac: My bigger websites tend to be course websites that are protected via Sitelok. It seems the free version of Zoom does not find and index pages behind password protection. (Nor do I see anyway to give Zoom the login credentials.) I was only trying the free version. Do you know if the free or pro version allows indexing of password protected pages somehow?
Greg: Thank you very much. That seems to work perfectly.
My next problem: the search includes the menu navigation names. For example, I’m teaching a statistics course. One menu nav item is ANOVA, but this is also a term used on some pages and not others. So if I search for ANOVA I get a lot of “false finds” in that the pages found have ANOVA only in the menu navigation. Any way to exclude those?
I thought Skip might do it, but I don’t want to skip the word “ANOVA” in general, only when it is used in the menu navigation.
Yes! Actually, for several days I had been dealing with an ISP-induced problem with installing RapidSearch Pro (RSP) when I tried Live Search. In the end the issue was resolved; RPS runs better than expected. I say better because I [believe I] am able to have unprotected content appear in search results of a page that has other parts of that page not appear in a search because it is protected by a Sitelok password.
