Ed's Big Plans

Followup: This is better than my previous Mediawiki search box solution because it doesn’t require an extra PHP file (search-redirect.php) to deploy. It relies completely on URL mangling inside the HTML form on the page you are putting the search box. Previous post here.

A valid HTML form input type is “hidden”. What this means is that a variable can be set without a control displayed for it in a form. Other input types for instance are “text” for a line of text and “submit” for the proverbial submit button — both of these input types are displayed. Variables set by the “hidden” input type are treated as normal and are shipped off via the GET or POST method that you’ve chosen for the whole html form…

So, to create the following mangled URL…

https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=searchterms&go=Go

There are the following variables … with the following values:

• title … “Special%3ASearch” (%3A is the HTML entity “:”)
  
• search … “searchterms” (the only variable requiring user input)
  
• go … “Go”
  

The only variable that needs to be assigned from the form is “search” to which I’ve assigned the placeholder “searchterms” in the above URL.

The form thus needs only to take input for the variable “search” with a “text” type input, while “title” and “go” are already assigned– a job for the “hidden” type input.

Here’s what the simplest form for this would look like…

<form action="https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php" method="get">
Search Ed's Wiki Notebook:
<input name="title" type="hidden" value="Special:Search" />
<input name="search" type="text" value="" />
<input name="go" type="hidden" value="Go" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Again, replace the text “Search Ed’s Wiki Notebook” with your own description and replace “https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php” with the form handler that you’re using– it’ll either be a bare domain, subdomain or could end with index.php if it’s a Mediawiki installation.

And that’s it! A far simpler solution than last time with the use of the “hidden” type input to assist in URL mangling.

Update: Here’s an even more improved version — this time, the end user doesn’t even see a page creation option when a full title match isn’t found. Demo (hooked up to my wiki) and Code below …

<form id="searchform" action="https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php" method="get">
<label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search Ed's Wiki Notebook:</label>
<input id="s" type="text" name="search" value="" />
<input name="fulltext" type="hidden" value="Search" />
<input id="searchsubmit" type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Notice that the variables “Special:Search” and “go” are not actually needed — instead, the variable “fulltext” is assigned the string “Search” — this causes mediawiki to hide the “You can create this page” option.

Update: A better solution that doesn’t require a separate “search-redirect.php” file has been posted here.

I’ve been looking for this solution for a long time now and I’m happy to have finally found it. Following hints from Dave Taylor and Peter De Decker, I’ve glued together a solution that doesn’t take too much effort and doesn’t require any additional hacking around in SQL.

The objective was to add a search box on the right-column navigation of this blog that would search my wiki notebook. It wasn’t until I stumbled on the above two blogs that I realized I can just mangle URLs to conduct a search on mediawikis! The specific URL used to search my wiki looks a little like this…

https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=searchterms&go=Go

It might be a bit different for your installation depending on the version that you installed and a few of your settings– to find out what it looks like, search for something and copy down the URL in the address bar.

The file “search-redirect.php” used by Wikipedia takes in your search terms, and mangles those terms into a URL conforming to the above example. It then redirects you to that constructed URL. You can find this used on the main page of Wikipedia as noted by Dave.

My search-redirect.php based on Peter’s work above is two lines long, and looks like this:

<php?
$redirect_url =
     "https://eddiema.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=".
     $_GET['search'].
     "&go=Go";
@header( "Location: ".$redirect_url );
?>

You probably want to place your own search-redirect.php in the root directory of your wiki installation– however, it looks to me like it doesn’t really matter since the whole URL is rewritten anyway. I bet you can put this file anywhere on the net that supports PHP. The final thing that’s missing is the search box– anything that uses this formula will work:

<form action="https://eddiema.ca/wiki/search-redirect.php" method="get">
Search Ed's Wiki:
<input type="text" name="search" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Putting this code on a page with your own wiki URL as a stem instead of mine will allow you to search your own wiki from any other page.