The OpenSearch API provides a flexible common standard for XML-powered searches. WordPress OpenSearch 1.0 worked on WordPress 1.5, but a few changes in the way WordPress deals with DB configuration and HTTP GET parameters caused it to fail in WordPress 2.0. Thanks to tips from James E. Robinson, III, version 1.1 of this plugin now wraps WordPress 2.0’s search functionality. This code should be generic enough to allow anyone to quickly add OpenSearch RSS feed functionality to a WordPress 2.0 site.

The source of version 1.1 is freely available for download here.

Here are six quick steps to getting your WordPress blog running an OpenSearch RSS feed:

Step 1

Download the WordPress OpenSearch code.

Step 2

Unpack the tgz contents into some directory under your wordpress installation. I chose /wp-content/code-plugins/wp-opensearch/. The “code-plugins” part isn’t strictly necessary; that’s just where I happened to put the files, as I didn’t feel right putting them in the plugins/ directory without first figuring out how to integrate the on/off switch with the WordPress admin interface. The php files do have relative require statements which access WordPress’s wp-blog-header.php, so being 3 directories down is important (unless you want to go to the small effort of changing the “../../..” values to reflect your directory structure).

Step 3

Replace logo.gif with your own 64 x 64 pixel image.

Step 4

Open up description.php and change whatever you like. Many values have been prefilled for your convenience. The ones you should be sure to replace are the tags, sample search, and my name and email address, unless you feel like making me more popular than I should be.

Step 5

Edit your .htaccess file so that the paths hardcoded in the PHP files will match up with the actual file locations on your site. Here’s a snippet from my .htaccess file, as an example. Be sure to add this before the line containing “# BEGIN WordPress”, or the broadly-scoped default WordPress rewrites may override yours.

# BEGIN OpenSearch

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteRule ^os-query?(.*)$ /wb/wp-content/code-plugins/wp-opensearch/wp-opensearch.php?$1 [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^os-description$ /wb/wp-content/code-plugins/wp-opensearch/description.php [QSA,L]

RewriteRule ^os-logo.gif$ /wb/wp-content/code-plugins/wp-opensearch/logo.gif [QSA,L]

</IfModule>

#END OpenSearch

Step 6

At this point, you should be ready to use your new OpenSearch RSS feed. Head over to a9.com and add it to your columns. They have preview functionality which lets you debug any problems you hadn’t noticed before.

The API is:

/os-query?s={searchTerms}&itemstart={startIndex}&itempage={startPage}&itemlimit={count}

This entry was posted by Chris on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.