magicfields posts

Canine: Wordpress Custom Searches

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.

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Stearns: Two Content Columns Per Page

Our layout has some pages with a three column layout and some pages with only two columns.  The left column is always the same, but the other two will have one or two columns based on individual page content.  For a while, we've had the third column on the home page and an empty third column on other pages, but we ran into troubles when we wanted to add the third column content to the other pages.

The columns use float to get their positioning and can't be inside each other or the text from one would flow under the other.  A few options came to mind.  We tried closing template divs and opening others in the HTML editor of the page content: this did not work for us, somehow removing the background that was supplied by a wrapper.  It would be trouble for Stearns anyway.  We also tried removing the container for the center column from the template and putting one div into two column pages, two into three column pages.  This gave some difficulties with the editor, would require the divs on every page, and would be difficult for Stearns and us to work with.

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