Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery - Ebook-Cours.com

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Chapter 9
Our plan
For our implementation, we will add autocompletion to the search field in the search
module's block. But rather than running a search for each autocompletion request,
we will build a scaled-down list of terms that we will define. Only that list of terms
will be used for autocompletion.
If this were a book on PHP development, I would suggest writing some server-side
code to collect and analyze search engine data, and then use that information to
pre-populate an autocompletion field. But we can't readily get that information.
So we will try another approach.We will use a Drupal taxonomy as the source for
our suggestions.
Taking this approach, we will allow content creators to add keywords to articles.
Those keywords will then be used for autocompletion.
First step: creating the taxonomy
We are going to use a taxonomy to seed our search terms. Drupal taxonomies are
collections of terms that are sometimes structured (such as a hierarchy of categories)
and sometimes unstructured (such as user-entered tags). Using taxonomies you
can add keywords, categories, and tags to the content on your site. But there
are many other uses for taxonomies. Ours will be used for providing our search
autocompletion with a list of suggestions.
On occasion, Drupal uses the term vocabulary instead of taxonomy.
Sometimes, a tenuous distinction is made (a taxonomy is made up of
vocabularies, which are in turn made up of terms). Practically speaking,
the term 'vocabulary' is a synonym for taxonomy.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Richard Ostheimer on 18th June 2009
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