caninelifeline posts

The Wordpress search by default looks through the title and content of all available posts and pages for given query words. But sometimes you might want to only search a certain category or search custom fields or some other criteria. On the Canine Lifeline site, we have a dog section where we want to be able to list dogs based on a number of parameters, such as age, gender, adoption status, et cetera. We are currently storing dogs as posts in a particular category, and using Magic Fields to add custom fields for various aspects of each dog.

Wordpress sends search queries as GET requests from its search form. The "s" variable contains the search query, but others are allowed. In fact, if you're familiar with the "query_posts" function, many of the parameters for that are available, and the rest can be enabled, because the search is basically just a regular Wordpress query with parameters appended from the GET variables.

For the Canine site, we wanted to have an XML sitemap to help search engines index the site. The sitemap can help search engines find all content on the site as well as tell it which pages are most important, how often they are updated, and when they were last modified.

There seems to be a number of plugins to generate the sitemap automatically for Wordpress, but the Google XML Sitemaps plugin seems to have the highest rating and have gotten the most mention in blogs. Jason had used this plugin already for his site, so we knew a little about it already, thus we went with it.

After some minor configuration, it worked just fine. It regenerates a static file every time a page or post is updated. Not as dynamic, but it saves processor time. I doubt the plugin will work with Pods at all, since that's outside the posts/pages dataset. Our Pods content probably won't be as important anyway. I could potentially look into modifying the plugin if need be for that.

Jason and I have begun work on the Canine Lifeline site I had mentioned as a fr…