Suggestion/Feature Request - Search Bar

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Suggestion/Feature Request - Search Bar

Rey

Hello,
I was wondering, how about adding a search bar in the top menu like this?

Many new users tend to forget where a particular function is located and keep on clicking different categories in the search of it. The one I have integrated in my deployment, searches through the available modules (from the sidebar) and displays them in the form of clickable links, as the user types a particular word/function they are searching for. (Please see the attached images)

I think it will help the new and old users alike.

Thanks.

francoisjacquet

Hello Rey

Sure, this can be useful. Thanks for the screenshots

How about contributing a plugin for this and publish it in its own git repo?

I suppose loading some JS/jQuery inside the function.php file (see this action hook) is enough to inject the HTML into the top bar and do the search logic?

Rey

francoisjacquet
Yes, I too was thinking to develop a plugin for the same.
Currently I just quickly incorporated the search functions by modifying the core files, just to check whether it will work or not.

What I did currently is took all the available links of the activated modules from side.php and stored them in a xml file, from there added the search box and required JavaScript in bottom.php and query the xml file from there. Needed two new files search.php for processing the search form and the links.xml file itself. Alongwith some additions in CSS. Did this quickly in a couple of days, very roughly.

Now, will look into how the plugin system works and how it can be incorporated in the system using plugins.

Thanks.

francoisjacquet

Hello Rey

Rey Needed two new files search.php for processing the search form and the links.xml file itself.

In my opinion, there is no need for PHP and XML here to do the search.

What is possible instead is to extract the menu links and program titles, and save them in an array, but dynamically using JS, and once, onload (no need to write a JSON file on disk).
Then search the array and display results, in JS too.

Even the step to extract to an array seems optional, you can simply search the menu DOM nodes' innerText.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3813294/how-to-get-element-by-innertext