Nice Search

This is a really simple plugin that redirects your WordPress searches (?s=search-term) to the pretty-looking URI version: /search/search-term, and also converts spaces (%20) to plus symbols.

Obviously, you need to have mod_rewrite enabled, so that WordPress can process the /search/ style URIs.

This plugin requires WordPress version 1.5 or higher.

Download

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112 Responses to “Nice Search”

Comment pages: [1] 2 »

  1. BleakGeek.com linked on June 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
  2. BleakGeek.com linked on June 22nd, 2005 at 11:52 pm
  3. BleakGeek.com linked on June 29th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
  4. David Collantes | July 8th, 2005 at 4:02 pm:

    Mark, how would the entry on .htaccess for this looks like? I am using an old version of WP and my search box looks like:

    " />

    My .htaccess search entry looks like:


    RewriteRule ^search/([/_0-9a-z-]+)/?$ /index.php?s=$1&submit=search [QSA]

    If I enter the search on the URI like http://www.collantes.us/search/XPS, it works, but if I use the existing search box it renders the old search results style.

  5. Mark (post author) | July 8th, 2005 at 4:08 pm:

    Your version of WordPress lacks the necessary hook. Also, your .htaccess mod_rewrite code seems to redirect instead of rewrite when a CAPS search term is used. You might have to add A-Z in that rewrite rule.

  6. David Collantes | July 8th, 2005 at 4:11 pm:

    Ahh, rats! Thanks Mark! One day, it will come… :-)

  7. BleakGeek.com » Nice Search Plugin for Wordpress linked on July 30th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
  8. Flickr: Binary Bonsai linked on September 5th, 2005 at 12:12 am
  9. How can i translate or remove some of the the mod_rewrite rule parameters? « WordPress Support linked on October 21st, 2005 at 11:18 pm
  10. Gerard | November 11th, 2005 at 10:31 am:

    Hi Mark,
    Your plugin makes something possible I desired very much: to be able to search in my Ultimate Tag Warrior tags (I call them keywords) by replacing the /search/ folder in your plugin by /keyword/. It even allows boolean tag1 and/or tag2 search this way. Thanks for that.
    But what I would like most is to have two search forms, one normal Wordpress search with the ‘nice search’ URI as the result. And one which allows the boolean search in my tags.
    I’m no coder so I can only choose between these options (OR) and hope you can think of a way to include both searches (AND) at my sites.
    Regards, Gerard

  11. Mark (post author) | November 12th, 2005 at 3:04 am:

    Gerard,
    You would likely have to make changes to the script that would change the type of search based on a radio button selection in the form. One radio button could be called “use_search” and the other could be called “use_tags” and then you could test for $_GET['use_search'] or $_GET['use_tags'] and redirect accordingly.

  12. ddhr.org - David Hosier linked on January 14th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
  13. ddhr.org linked on January 15th, 2006 at 4:55 am
  14. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 8:44 am:

    This is a great plugin. It works very well. But when I search for something with 2 keyterms and a space in between, eg. “wordpress plugins” the URL becomes

    http://siteurl.com/search/wordpress%20plugins

    Is there a way to change the %20 to a dash or something?

    Thank you. :)

  15. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 9:02 am:

    Just a problem here, after I change the permalinks of search page, I get a 404 error when I do a search, any idea how to fix it? It works after I changed the permalinks back to the old one.

  16. Mark (post author) | January 28th, 2006 at 9:37 am:

    What do you mean “change the permalinks of search page”? In WP, search isn’t really a page, it is a $_GET parameter ( $_GET['s'] ).

  17. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 9:53 am:

    I’ve created a search page with this in the page

    At first it works when the permalink to the seach page was

    http://siteurl.com/category/search/

    but after changing it to

    http://siteurl.com/search/

    all searches resulted in 404 errors when I do a search with the plugin enable, after changing back to the old slug for the search page, this plugin works again. Any idea how to fix it for the new slug?

    Thank you.

  18. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 9:55 am:

    sorry, my code didn’t turn up well..

    the code is

    TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/searchform.php’

    in php

  19. Mark (post author) | January 28th, 2006 at 9:57 am:

    Give me a link to your site, and I’ll take a look at it.

  20. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 10:00 am:

    Thank you.

    Link to search page:
    http://liberta.espoireve.com/search/

    Example of a search:
    http://liberta.espoireve.com/search/test

  21. Mark (post author) | January 28th, 2006 at 11:33 am:

    Aha! The problem there is that you have a WordPress page called “search.” This is “intercepting” the /search/ part of search URIs and breaking them. If you rename the “slug” for your search page to something like search-form or something other than “search,” the problem will be resolved.

  22. Dayna | January 28th, 2006 at 12:04 pm:

    Right, is it possible to have the slug of the search page as search but change the URL of the search into

    http://siteurl.com/searchresults/test

    ?

  23. Mark (post author) | January 28th, 2006 at 2:37 pm:

    Yes, that’s possible, but it’d require a plugin to do it… and it would be different depending on whether or not you used WP 1.5.x or WP 2.x

  24. Dayna | January 31st, 2006 at 1:14 am:

    Right, I understand will just stick to the current one now.

    Referring back to http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/nice-search/#comment-12078

    this comment, is there a way to change the

    wordpress%20plugins to wordpress+plugins?

    Thank you for being so patient with me. :)

  25. Pure-Essence.Net » Wordpress Tips & Tricks linked on February 1st, 2006 at 7:23 am
  26. Dave | May 24th, 2006 at 10:44 am:

    You can change the %20 to a dash by using the WordPress function “sanitize_title”. Replace $_REQUEST['s'] with sanitize_title($_REQUEST['s']). Also, you can add a trailing slash with this: ** . '/'

    Great plugin, Mark.

  27. Dave | May 24th, 2006 at 10:46 am:

    Some of that code didn’t copy well. Here’s another try:

    sanitize_title($_REQUEST['s']) . ’/’

  28. Dave | May 30th, 2006 at 7:05 am:

    One more thing (sorry for so many comments, Mark): The sanitized title removes apostrophes and other characters, so you can’t search for words like don’t or can’t.

    Also, my copying attempt from last time still didn’t completely work because WordPress doesn’t like lots of slashes. Oh well.

  29. Vanessa | June 1st, 2006 at 12:39 pm:

    I am trying to make a beautiful search bar like yours without the big space and submit button that is in wordpress. I have downloaded the plug-in. What is the call for yours and do I need to change the css?

  30. GaMerZ.Forums :: View topic - WP PAGE NAVI in wordpress 2.0.1 linked on June 3rd, 2006 at 9:34 am
  31. PaulStamatiou.com » The Importance of Permalinks linked on June 4th, 2006 at 10:37 am
  32. Methoden der Suchmaschinen-Optimierung (SEO) unter WordPress - bueltge.de [by:ltge.de] linked on June 15th, 2006 at 4:51 am
  33. bueltge.de [by:ltge.de] linked on June 15th, 2006 at 9:35 am
  34. Zfen | June 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am:

    Just found a little bug in your plugin:

    I use the WP-Paginate Plugin. If i go to page 2 and then go back to page one, the $_GET['s'] has a slash at his end. So wordpress is searching for a+searchstring/ and finds nothing.

    Just fixed it very simple with the following code. Just put it into your plugin and it works ;) 

    function replace_search_slash()
{
 if(!empty($_GET['s']))
 {
  $_GET['s'] = str_replace(’/', ”, $_GET['s']);
 }
}

add_action(’init’, ‘replace_search_slash’);

    And also a big thank you for this wonderfull plugin.

  35. Hans | June 30th, 2006 at 1:29 pm:

    I have “Nice search” working on one of my sites (very nice!) and now I am trying to implement it on a Yahoo Hosted site.

    The strange fact is that using a search through the regular search box generates the “old” URL with “/index.php?s=test” and gives a 404.

    If I manually use the “/search/test” sting in the browser the correct results come up.

  36. Will’s Blog » Acknowledgments linked on July 10th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
  37. _ck_ | July 28th, 2006 at 4:23 pm:

    Nice work on this.
    I wanted to point out for your next update on it that you should really not hardcode “search” in there since Wordpress has had the ability (since 2.0?) to change the search path for the internal regex. You can query the new path. In 2.1 it will be editable right in the panel.

    Also I try to prevent redirects from even being needed by adding this onsubmit in the hopes that most users will have javascript enabled:


    '+document.forms["searchform"].s.value.replace(/ /gi,’+');”>

    I believe we both need to replace “/search/” with $wp_rewrite->search_base.”/”

    This will help with foreign languages and if someone wants to rename it to searchresults or find or something else weird ;)

    Keep up the great work…

  38. _ck_ | July 28th, 2006 at 4:27 pm:

    sorry, your setup trashed my little strip of code :(

    lets try it this way

    onsubmit="
document.location=''+document.forms["searchform"].s.value.replace(/ /gi,’+');”

    (and remove all the newlines)

  39. Kareem | July 29th, 2006 at 9:12 am:

    Hello, what should I do to have a /find/ instead of a /search/?

  40. John Noone » Blog Archive » links for 2006-08-17 linked on August 17th, 2006 at 7:52 am
  41. Standa | September 17th, 2006 at 1:35 pm:

    Hi! It’s an excellent plugin! Thanks for this. I would use it.
    But I have any trouble: the plugin remove non-ASCII letters. It’s problem.
    F.e. in my language (Czech), ther’re a letters with diacritic marks. And the result of plugin is like this:
    /search/růžový — > remove 3 letters — > results: /search/rov
    Can I correct it somehow?

  42. Vinny Carpenter’s blog · WordPress linked on September 29th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
  43. andrew | November 17th, 2006 at 6:52 pm:

    Great plugin, only one issue for me: Using WP 2.0.5, on the search results page it says “Search Results for:(blank)” where (blank) should be the terms searched for.

    I’m using the sandbox theme http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/ . Not sure if this is why, I’m a bit of a newbie with this all.

  44. patung | December 21st, 2006 at 12:56 pm:

    These two urls are the same:

    http://www.site.com/search/term

    http://www.site.com/search/term/

    Is there anyway to force one or the other, preferably the one with the trailing slash?

  45. Adam Messinger | January 8th, 2007 at 4:04 am:

    This may be a quirk that’s specific to my host, but activating this plugin has some strange effects for me. Every search leads to a page with the title “200 OK” and the following content:

    OK

    The document has moved here.

    The word “here” is a link that will take the searcher on to the properly-redirected page. “200 OK” is the Apache status code that means the resource was found, so I can’t figure out why I’m getting this message at all. Could this be related to this similar bug report for a different plugin?

    I also used to get the same thing when I was still using Alex King’s Popularity Contest plugin (when resetting comment/ping counts). Since visitors never saw that message, I didn’t worry about it.

    I’ve posted a similar message to this one on my host’s forum. If this turns out to be a server configuration issue, I’ll bring you the details.

  46. Plugins // shorty114.net linked on January 14th, 2007 at 2:32 am
  47. still trapped in the paperless, wireless, timeless and spaceless office linked on January 19th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
  48. ole | February 6th, 2007 at 8:56 am:

    good plugin!

    but not work with utf-8 …

  49. Lorelle on WordPress linked on February 9th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
  50. Ally | June 13th, 2007 at 9:08 am:

    I’m a real newbie with WordPress, as i am with most of the internet, but I’m going to give this a go. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

  51. WP Plugins DB » Plugin Details » Nice Search linked on July 3rd, 2007 at 6:05 am
  52. indir | July 29th, 2007 at 6:55 am:

    thanks

  53. youtube | July 29th, 2007 at 6:56 am:

    Great plugin, only one issue for me: Using WP 2.0.5, on the search results page it says “Search Results for:(blank)” where (blank) should be the terms searched for. ??

  54. download | July 29th, 2007 at 6:57 am:

    Forget it… I did it.
    The subpage already shown…

  55. Artem | August 7th, 2007 at 12:27 pm:

    Installed plug-in on one of my blogs and see that it looks very pretty and useful for blog exiting.

  56. Damian | August 16th, 2007 at 5:46 am:

    Hi, I’m running WP 2.2.2 I downloaded your nice-search file and activated the plugin but I get this error when doing a search:

    Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home.9.13/mydomain/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/nice-search.php:1) in /home.9.13/mydomain/www/blog/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 331

    Any idea what’s the problem? Thx! :)

  57. Wyszukiwarka w wordpressie i modrewrite - Polski support WordPress linked on August 19th, 2007 at 9:59 am
  58. asds | September 1st, 2007 at 11:53 pm:

    thanks to your plugin, but i have the same problem like this:

    http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/nice-search/comment-page-1/#comment-35667

    i’m a chinese, so we do searching with many non-ASCII characters, when we search them, eg. 中文, we got a 404 page.

  59. Friendly Search URLs | alexking.org linked on September 6th, 2007 at 10:51 am
  60. seotronic | September 17th, 2007 at 2:28 am:

    Nice little Plugin. Thanx for that !

  61. Pæne søgninger med WordPress « WordPress Tips linked on September 29th, 2007 at 6:27 am
  62. Doug | October 4th, 2007 at 9:24 pm:

    Great plugin. I have one question: Can you make it so a URL like http://example.com/search/ points to something useful (like a search form or page), rather than return a 404? As you mentioned above, creating a page with the slug ’search’ intercepts the plugin. But not having a page with the simple /search/ URL messes up the beauty of the nice URLs.

  63. Video izle | October 5th, 2007 at 4:54 pm:

    thanks

  64. Manele | October 9th, 2007 at 8:44 am:

    Thx for plugin

  65. chamaktesitare.com | October 9th, 2007 at 6:17 pm:

    thank you

  66. Video izle | October 12th, 2007 at 11:01 am:

    Thank you

  67. How to Improve Search Function in Wordpress [Using Plugins] » Ericulous linked on October 16th, 2007 at 2:01 am
  68. Vista office | October 19th, 2007 at 9:51 am:

    thanks

  69. video izle | October 20th, 2007 at 6:48 am:

    Thanks for plugin…

  70. diziizle | October 25th, 2007 at 2:07 pm:

    Thanks it is worth to try,get rid of annoying signs with a simple htaccess line.

  71. Manele | November 2nd, 2007 at 12:33 am:

    Thank you for your useful plugin! this help me a lot on my blog!

  72. trademark registration | November 14th, 2007 at 1:09 am:

    This is a great plugin as well. This has really helped me out. thanks so much.

  73. Backlink Checker linked on November 24th, 2007 at 7:03 am
  74. Manele Noi | November 24th, 2007 at 7:04 am:

    thank`s nice man very intresting

  75. Muzica Noua | November 24th, 2007 at 7:09 am:

    very intresting

  76. Muzica | November 24th, 2007 at 7:11 am:

    i have tested the plugins, works ok

  77. John | November 26th, 2007 at 3:53 pm:

    Great plugin.

    I would like to change the /search/ part to something else. Like /s/

    Is this possible? I noticed it was not just a matter or rewriting the url in the code.

    Thanks.

  78. » Como melhorar a pesquisa do teu blog - MUIOMUIO.NET linked on November 28th, 2007 at 7:54 am
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  81. Internal Search Optimization - Ninedays Blog - web development, photography, tutorials and adventure linked on December 4th, 2007 at 11:38 am
  82. Pande | December 15th, 2007 at 6:59 pm:

    Hi Mark, great plugin, I would like to change the /search/ for the spanish word /buscar/. What should I change?
    Thanks in advance….

  83. Travelvice Compendium: WordPress v2.3.1 Plugins linked on December 18th, 2007 at 2:48 am
  84. Manele gratis | January 9th, 2008 at 2:28 pm:

    youre effort means allot for us.. and the plugins you have for us are just great.. thanks!

  85. Graphics and Innovation linked on January 11th, 2008 at 1:52 am
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  94. Blog Tool Box linked on January 22nd, 2008 at 7:52 pm
  95. John | January 28th, 2008 at 5:51 pm:

    Hi there,

    Please can you advise how I can install this plugin on my site.

    Regards. John.

  96. news romona moreau linked on January 29th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
  97. Muzica Noua | January 31st, 2008 at 12:55 pm:

    thx for this site…great job

  98. tv online | February 1st, 2008 at 3:52 am:

    Thank you.

    Link to search page:
    http://liberta.espoireve.com/search/

    Example of a search:
    http://liberta.espoireve.com/search/test

  99. Manele Noi | February 1st, 2008 at 1:40 pm:

    Great Post!!!
    Manele noi

  100. Blog and Web - Plantillas blogger, recursos y tutoriales. linked on February 2nd, 2008 at 4:59 am

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