#! code

Every Drupal project I finish will usually have the same request at some point. This usually happens when the client tries to do a search that produces no results and sees the search hinting text about blue smurfs.

I needed to create a query that did a case insensitive search using the LIKE command in MySQL and I quickly realised that in order to do this I would need to alter both the parameter and the table data to be the same case. This can be done by using the MySQL UPPER() command on the table data and the strtoupper() PHP function on the input data.

$name = strtoupper('phil');
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE UPPER(forename) LIKE '" . $name . "%'";

This will produce the following SQL query.

A common practice when creating sites in Drupal is to create different node types for different purposes. Sometimes these node types can be functionality based rather than content based and are used for creating a rotating banner or something similar. A side effect of this is that you will then see these nodes appearing in search results, which can cause some confusing results to be displayed.

A related items block looks at the current content of the page and tries to present the user with a list of items that relate to the current content. Creating a related items block is quite easy, and is a good way of introducing the search module api without having to get to involved in the search module.

Wordpress allows administrators to change the number of posts that are printed out on a page at once on the page Settings > Reading. However, this also has an impact on the number of search results that Wordpress will display. In order to keep the size of the home page down many Wordpress admins will reduce the number of articles to two or three. This can instantly make search results with only a few results reach many pages.

Last time we had indexed our PDF documents and were ready to add a search form to our application. Adding search requires two things, the form to enter the search terms into and an action to control what happens when the form is submitted.