Hi Guys

Really stuck this time! (Again!)

1) I've put the search results from Coffeecup into an iframe on a separate page, though not linked to it on the site yet - it's just here to 'play' with:

search results page

Problem: if you search for, say "nlp" the results come up OK. The top result is for Coffeecup, which opens a complete new page. But if any of the site links are clicked the site pages open in the iframe. Hmmm...not so good! Any ideas please?

2) If you look at an ordinary page, the search box now shows at the top. Enter 'nlp' there and a new page opens, but it doesn't look as though it's on the website....no header/footer etc.

In the Coffeecup software setup there is an HTML button, which allows you to paste in the HTML for a header and a footer. I assume I can copy something from the SS page HTML to paste into both of these boxes, but don't have a clue where to start!

Any help here please?

3) This search software by Coffeecup is ideal for this particular site application and only costs $34 and can be used for my other sites too ... but I'm not sure it's that user-friendly for SS users. If any genius SS-user has the time and inclination to download the trial version (21 days) and play about with it, perhaps they could come up with some solutions?

If not, I'll plug away and hope to stumble across something.

I can't see Coffeecup being receptive to my questions, as VM has a Google Adwords campaign directed against their website-building software & directing searchers to look at SS LOL!

mccifa

On point 2, I have experimented and SS and Coffeecup just don't talk to each other in the current format. The graphics and links don't appear/work.

Plus the header and footer are just that....so with a side bar the right things just don't seem to happen.

I can probably get a reasonable header to appear but then there won't be links back to other pages.

OK.....so the alternative is to ask VM to produce a search vehicle like Coffeecup's, LOL! Methinks there may be no love lost between the two, so perhaps I'm not clutching at straws? (And pigs might fly, I hear you say!)

mccifa

I downloaded and ran some tests...

1. How (or where) did you want the links to open? You will need to modify the code to add a target attribute to each generated search link. This is best done by adding code to the CoffeeCup search.php code (or search.asp) script. Which do you use? I can help with altering the php script as this is what my set-up produces.

2. You need to use standard HTML codes for the header and footer sections of the CoffeeCup search. Note that these only show up on the results page. Generate the header in SS, view the page and copy&paste the necessary header code from the view source to the CC HTML header window. I suggest you do the header and footer in separate SS pages so you can extract any necessary CSS codes. Since the CC search result page is a bare HTML page you may need to play with the CSS values to get things looking right.

3. My quick tests show that the CC search script generates some poorly formatted HTML pages. My test pages had closing </body> and </html> tags, but no corresponding opening tags nor head tags.

I am not a big fan of using Flash front-ends which do nothing more than execute a PHP or ASP script to produce the results. Why not just use a free PHP script to start with and forget the middleman? Or even google site search?