Updated Livesearch for Movable Type

Last month when I finished my site redesign, one thing I also ended up doing was recreating the Livesearch feature I have on here. This was not something I had planned on doing, but I messed something up with the old one and I was unable to fix it.

Just for some background, my original Livesearch was based on some Javascript and a PHP search script for Movable Type.
What had happened, is I messed something up rendering the PHP search to no longer work. I spent hours going over all the code and going through my database to try and find a reason, couldn't figure it out. So, instead, I decided to set the Livesearch to work with the built-in Movable Type search instead.

To do this, you will still want to follow the installation instructions to get the HTML setup on your page and the Javascript setup. There's going to be one change to the livesearch.js file I will mention later.

To setup a search template, you will need to upload a new file to the search_templates folder of your MT install. The file should be named livesearch.tmpl. Here is what the file should contain:


<MTSearchResults>



<MTBlogResultHeader>

<strong>SEARCH</strong> : Results for "<$MTSearchString$>"

<ul class="LSRes">

</MTBlogResultHeader>



<li class="LSRow">

<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>

</li><!--LSRow-->

</MTSearchResults>



<MTNoSearchResults>

<ul class="LSRes">

<li class="LSRow">

No results for "<$MTSearchString$>"

</li><!--LSRow-->

</MTNoSearchResults>



</ul><!--LSRes-->


The next thing you will want to do is open your mt.cfg file and add the line "AltTemplate ls livesearch.tmpl" without the quotes. This will tell Movable Type to use this search template and gives it an ID of "ls".
Now all you will need to do is edit the livescript.js file. You will need to look for liveSearchReq.open("GET", liveSearchRoot + "/livesearch.php?q=" + document.forms.searchform.q.value + liveSearchParams); and replace it with liveSearchReq.open("GET", liveSearchRoot + "/mt/mt-search.cgi?SearchElement=both&SearchCutoff=99999&MaxResults=10&Template=ls&search=" + escape(document.forms.searchform.q.value));

You may need to adjust that line so it points to your mt-search.cgi script. Also, the SearchElement=both can be changed to SearchElement=entries if you don't want comments included in your search and the MaxResults can be what you would like.

Once you've done this, you should be all set to go using Livesearch on your Movable Type-based site.