This open approach lets anyone build a search engine to their particular skills, mash the data with other sources, re-arrange results, or any other novel idea for the next king of search. You could also use BOSS to add search capabilities to a pre-existing site, limiting the resuts to just its data.

Why is Yahoo! doing this? It’s a brash approach to push search beyond its current status of pages with ordered sets of links You can let your imagine fly with the only cost being your personal development investment. I recently took this challenge and decided to build a search engine for vegetarians.

V3GGIE – A Vegetarian Search Engine

My goals were simple:

1. Create a simple site that could be copied easily as a proof of concept for other genres. Document the construction for others to explore.
2. Keep it fast with minimal javascript and images
3. Use as much Yahoo infrastructure as possible to minimize development time
4. Most importantly: return information relevant to the niche audience: Vegetarians and Vegans.

I’m not a PHP expert and some of my code is crude. I hope to clean it up and add a number of features to enhance performance and usability. However, the code samples will still be useful to the PHP beginner. More advanced PHP programmers could easily see where they’d take the concepts and improve on them.

Set up the basic structure

V3ggie has a basic workflow, there’s an input and result page. Arguably, this should only be one page which displays the original landing and subsequent results. I have separated them as I hope to create extra content that is appropriate to either the landing or results pages.

Further, there are several search engines built into this site. Each has a specific set of resources to fine tune the results. Currently, these are built with subdirectories (/recipes/, /blogs/, /news/, /local/ ). Each subsection includes index and result pages. This could be changed by utilizing rewrite rules. I’ve kept it simple for now.

Setup the Resources

The BOSS API allows you to create a query param with a list of domains to search through. This is the easiest way to fine tune your results. For instance, the V3ggie recipe search page uses a list of vegetarian cooking sites as well as the vegetarian subdirectories of Epicurious and FoodNetwork.

Technorati is the source for blog buzz. V3ggie searches through blogs tagged with “vegetarian” and/or “vegan”. This helps get the vegetarian viewpoint for any subject.

You have complete freedom to mash the data as much as you like. You could take the search results and mix them with other data, such as the page rank for a result page, the company or product’s appearance on wikipedia, or perhaps data you’ve stored in your own databases. I can imagine creating an internal product search page that cross-references the results with a list of preferred vendors to encourage employees to purchase supplies from the correct vendor.

Setup the Platform

V3ggie is built from PHP. However, Yahoo! has also provided a python platform, the BOSS Mashup Framework, for building sites very quickly. You can combine this with the Google App Engine to create a custom search engine in a short time. Four Hour Search, formally known as Yuil, is such an example. It got its name from the length of time it required to research a domain name, setup Google Apps, and build the final search web site. Personally, I spent more than 4 hours trying to get Google Apps set up and I really didn’t want to learn yet another language (python).

YUI on the frontend

The Yahoo! User Interface library handles the tedious, basic formatting of a page. The CSS libraries allow you to create a wide variety of page grids, standardize the fonts, reset browser inconsistencies and establish a common look and feel.

I started the project by using the CSS Grid Builder. This easy to use tool sets up the page with the desired columns and includes the base css files. I then added the YUI Base CSS file. This takes the plain page and re-establishes the margins and font-styles for a basic site. These two CSS files will remove 75% of the CSS you would normally have to write for a site. Now you can concentrate on what makes your site special.

I also wanted to offer different seach options from a single interface. Once again, I used the YUI TabView package. This combination of CSS and JS allows you to create a semantic set of links and corresponding series of div wrapped objects. YUI Tab View will turn this into the tabbed interface that even has built in ARIA support for screen readers.

I had some trouble getting the tabs to look correct. The documentation does not make it very clear that tab links must have an em within the links to get the proper look and feel. I also downloaded the preferred sprite and used fireworks to change the tab color gradients from blue to green.

Yahoo also provides a design pattern library. This helped me configure my pagination links. Yahoo has spent a lot of time with user testing to make sure things are easy to use.

Create your own search engine

So, what are you wating for? Visit the Yahoo Developer Network and start by signing up and getting a application key. I will write separate posts that describe how to build various components of the page. I’m looking forward to hearing from better PHP programmers on how to improve the code.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Natural Language Image Search with Yahoo Boss and Google App Engine
• Yahoo Boss Is So Open, It Runs on Google’s App Engine

I’ve come across a problem that should be easy to solve. WordPress allows you to create a category whose posts are displayed differently than other category posts. These “asides” are short posts that appear in the side bar and not in the main body of the blog. This functionality is baked into the latest versions of WordPress and the K2 theme’s admin screen makes it really easy to use.

However, I need to add a second variation of the asides. I want to create a new landing page with three promo spots just below the topnav. This branding section would allow the site to highlight important features, promos, sales, or blog posts. This could be done with asides, however I don’t want to lose the functionality of asides in the blog section.

Asides become Promos

I’ve started by cloning the asides module and functionality and creating a new set of functions (promos). The admin screen now allows you to choose a category that will be defined as a promo. Everything seems to be working until you get to the blog post page. Blog posts labeled as the asides category appear as they should.

However, the promos category and promo posts are not following the aside functionality. I’ve looked at the loop to see where it excludes the asides category and can’t find it. I can’t find the “the_post()” function, which may be the source of the issue. I would assume that the promos module is telling the_post that “promos” category is special and these posts should not be included in the loop, nor in the category list.

help?

Have you worked with the asides functionality in WordPress? Do you have any suggestions? I’ll post a summary when I get the solution figured out.

Resources

Here’s a list of related web pages that include information but haven’t answered my questions.

• WordPress Codex: The Loop
• WP_Query function reference
• 1 post, 3 asides on front page support question
• Adding Asides

Updates

The above link for the loop has some interesting information on multiple loops within one page. I’m going through the examples for some answers. Here’s a snippet of the post:

Loop Examples

Below are two examples of using multiple loops. The key to using multiple loops is that $wp_query can only be called once. In order to get around this it is possible to re-use the query by calling rewind_posts() or by creating a new query object. This is covered in example 1. In example 2, using a variable to store the results of a query is covered. Example 3 documents the use of the update_post_caches(); function to avoid common plugin problems. Finally, ‘multiple loops in action’ brings a bunch of ideas together to document one way of using multiple loops to promote posts of a certain category on your blog’s homepage.
WordPress Codex: The Loop

Updated: the solution

During my initial modification of the files, I missed an important line that tells the loop to honor a new filter. So, if you want to duplicate the asides functionality with a new category, add this new section to wordpress/wp-content/themes/k2/app/includes/info.php

function k2promos_filter($query) {
global $k2sbm_current_module;
$promos = get_option('k2promoscategory');
// Only filter when it's in the homepage
if ( ($promos != 0) and ($query->is_home) and (!$k2sbm_current_module) and

( (function_exists('is_active_module') and is_active_module('promos_module')) or
(function_exists('is_active_widget') and is_active_widget('k2_promos_widget')) ) ) {
$priorcat = $query->get('cat');
if ( !empty($priorcat) ) {
$priorcat .= ',';
}
$query->set('cat', $priorcat . '-' . $promos);
}
return $query;
}
// Filter to remove promos from the loop
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'k2promos_filter');

In a fit of cleverness, I changed the naming convention on my promos from promos_sidebar_module to promos_module. This threw my code off for a while.

This is the rough draft of my promos.php file that sits in wordpress/wp-content/themes/k2/app/modules/promos.php

There are also some changes in the options.php file and sbm section. Do a search for asides and start replacing with your new function, i.e. promos.

Remove the categories from latest posts and categories modules

The next step in this process was to make sure the promos category (and asides) don’t appear in the category and latest posts modules. These two modules sit inside the /k2/app/modules/ folder. They also use similar logic. We need to create a comma delimited list of categories to exclude from the functions that build the appropriate lists.

This code checks for aside and promos categories. It then creates a comma separator and then combines the categories into a string, i.e. “12,13″

global $k2sbm_current_module;

For the latest posts, we’ll need to create a slightly different string. We need to create a parameter and add a negative sign to each category


$excludes = '-' . $asides . $separator . '-' . $promos;

actually, this is bad logic, I need to only add the – if the category exists. That’s what is great about blogging your code. You realize your mistakes before it is too late.

Finally, we use that excludes variable in the logic to hide the categories, for example (categories.php)

wp_list_categories('title_li=&show_count=1&hierarchical=0&exclude=' . $excludes);


These snippets assume you do not want to include your asides posts into the latest posts and categories modules. you can simplify the code if you only want to exclude the promos.

• WordPress Hacks: Upgrading Versions [via Zemanta]
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.5 Due Any Day, Beta 2 Released, Many Plugins Updated, WordCamp Dallas This Weekend, WordCamp UK Suggested, and More [via Zemanta]
• A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work… [via Zemanta]

I don’t know if it is a Yahoo! secret system, so let’s just call this new extension .ted. I like the way that sounds. So, how do I get this new .ted file to look like a .php file in Dreamweaver’s code view? I tried to find the information on the Macromedia Adobe site and only came up with documentation about the preexisting .inc files.

David A found this page: Changing and adding file extensions recognized by Dreamweaver MX. It solved the issue.

Dreamweaver has a series of text and xml files that let you customize it’s functionality. You’ll need to open these files in something other than Dreamweaver. I used XMLSpy but Notepad would be just as peachy. There’s a txt file, Extensions.txt, that lists all of the file types recognized. Add your new file name at the top and then under the subcategory. I added .ted under php.
You then need to open MMDocumentTypes.xml and add the new file extensions in the appropriate win and mac file extensions fields.

This may sound complicated but it is pretty easy. I’d give it a 1 star on the difficulty ratings.

I was hoping that I could set up multiple .ted files, i.e. css.ted, php.ted, and js.ted. Dreamweaver doesn’t like these double file type strings. So just choose the category that best fits your programming field.

Finding this information could take you hours, possibly days. Adjusting the files and living a much happier coding life will take about 5 minutes. Now stop staring at black text and make it purty!

Updated Code

As Scott mentioned in the comments, I have changed the snippet to put quotation marks around the second regular expression.

$date=“12/31/2006″;
print ereg_replace(“([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)”,“\2/\1/\3“,$date);

As he described it, the first section of the ereg_replace statement takes the date and places it into three variables, 1,2,and 3. It then places those variables into a new string in the 2/1/3 pattern. That makes this a round trip function. Your European dates can get converted back to Yankee days as well.

But, in the spirit of learning new things, I persevered. I installed PuTTY (putty.zip) on my desktop and began the effort of logging in and updating the server. (PuTTY is a simple program that allows you to establish SSH connections with a server) Alas, it was a no-go. I couldn’t establish a connection. At this point, I do what is normal for a front-end engineer. I fired up the Yahoo! messenger and sent plaintive cries to the back-end engineers that seemed to be online for help. Unfortunately, they had just left their computers running and were nowhere to be seen.

So, back to the Dreamhost twiki. Luckily, their SSH documentation links to a really great blogpost by Phile Planet. This tutorial on How to setup SSH on Windows XP walks you through the process step-by-step. It even predicted that one step may not work for me and offered the workaround.

Logging in

I was able to login at this point by going to the command prompt, typing plink mydomain.com and entering my username and password (Dreamhost people: it’s the FTP username/password). I don’t know why the original tutorial went further to do something else but if it doesn’t work for you, try doing the extra step

• Go back to the command prompt and type pageant. Double-click on the computer wearing a hat when it pops up in your system tray
• Click Add Key and go to where you stored that private key. Double-click it and enter your password for the key if you made one earlier
• Now go to the command prompt and type plink mydomain.com
• Enter your username and it should just login from there

That’s about it. Here are a few links with stuff you can do in the Shell

www.phileplanet.com/archives/2006/08/how-to-setup-ssh-on-windows-xp/

Take a look at this tutorial if you are using Dreamhost, or any host for that matter, and Windows XP. It will take you about 15 minutes to set up PuTTY on your machine and hook it into the Dreamhost servers. You’ll never know when you need something like this and it’s nice to know that you’ve already got it setup ahead of time.

I’ve gotten comfortable with CSS. It’s like walking and chewing gum. I don’t check CSS Zen Garden every day for the latest design. I don’t seem to have the time to experiment with new CSS3 techniques. I’m getting stale.

So, what do I do? I’ve been working heavily in CSS, XML, and XSL for the past two years. It’s time to do something new. I’ve dabbled in adapting other people’s php code. I’ve dabbled in handheld style sheets. I’ve dabbled with RSS feeds and a million other things. My goals this year are to break into some new paths. I’m going to start building php pages from scratch, play around with Flash lite and other mobile applications, and delve into Internationalisation.

I’m starting from scratch with PHP. As soon as I finish my first project, I’ll document it on this site for the other CSS people out there looking for the base level tutorials. I know the frustration of asking for advice and having a PHP coder say “It’s easy, setup a parser, blah, blah blah……. and that’s it!”

Yahoo! Food

When I heard Yahoo! was building a food site, I thought Hot Diggity Damn. I want to work on that one. However, I was deeply committed to an important post-launch facelift of Yahoo! Tech. So, I told the Food team that I wanted to help as much as possible. This is a really nice site, with a great leader. The site, from the very beginning, had a distinct character and huge ambitions. Programming the code was nothing compared to what the project managers did for the content.

I was only able to help with some of the early templates and platform settings. The Food team deserves tons of credit for putting together a great site in an amazingly quick time.

Eden Floral Designs

When I came to Yahoo!, I knew very little about PHP and XSL. I was anxious to learn the languages and have gotten pretty darn good with XSL. PHP, however is still a new language for me. My friend Pam asked me to help her build an e-commerce site for her new floral business back in early summer. I told her I couldn’t do it but would look around. Soon enough, I realized this was a good time to jump knee-deep in PHP and learn how to use it. We grabbed a pre-packaged cart sytem, enlisted a friend, Marc, to do the secured server settings, and off we went.

X-cart is robust, but fairly easy to work with. It’s PHP and Smarty based. I spent several weeks replacing tables with standards-based markup, editing the CSS, updating the JS, and adding Pam’s unique visual statement. It’s a pretty site with lots of white space and no rounded corners, my pet peeve.

I still have some validation errors to fix, some legacy code to cleanup, and some cross-browser fixes. But for just the two of us, this site came out pretty dang nice. If you are looking for a San Diego Florist, check out the site. If you are looking for an e-commerce platform, take a look at X-cart. This site took about 200 hours to transform and build. That’s not a small amount, but I considered it a learning experience and didn’t mind a bit.

Coming Up

I’m working on a new project at Yahoo! that is coming along great. In this world of bloated Web 2.0 web sites, this is a lean, mean fighting machine. It is blazingly fast and perfectly suited for its audience. You’ll have to wait a few more weeks for the announcement.