search tool ? amember users need suggestions

Hi,

Does anyone know of a search tool that works with amember. I want the search tool to search through the entire website including the protected pages.

Any tried and tested search tool?

Thank you

I have a similar issue. I don't have root access on this machine, but would still like to offer a search utility. Currently, the protected directories cannot be indexed by any script I've tried.

Any suggestions?

would this require extensive php programming or is it a fairly simple addition?

Perhaps not all cases, but could you at least give some more helpful insight aside from "it is possible."

I would prefer not to have to pay additional money in order to have my script worked into Amember. Do you have any recommendations for scripts that may require little or no adjustments in order to work with Amember? Also, would you be willing to provide the coding, assuming the work is very little. I think this would be a useful patch/update, etc. as I've seen several who are having similar issues.

I found a search tool that searches protected pages

http://www.picosearch.com

I have just set up an account with them. From the FAQ's and docs I think this should work with Amember.

I hope it does, my website badly needs a working search function.

Some how none of these search tools work with amember



My search for a search tool still continues....

none of the tools I tried are able to sucessfully index pages in the amember protected folder.

workaround

hi,

i've figured out a workaround to do search, in case anyone cares.

this should work for any access method that used the .htaccess file. the example below is based on using the new_rewrite method.

the first thing you need to do is figure out what information is sent by your search engine provider when it crawls your site. you can do this by scanning your web server access logs.

i'm using freefind.com. their spider, when it loads a web page, generates the following information in my web server log:

64.142.79.41 - - [27/Feb/2005:04:06:00 -0600] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 502965 "http://blahblahblah.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 95; http://www.freefind.com/spider.html )"

so i figured out that it's send a user_agent string which includes the words "freefind" in it. (the user_agent string is the one that begins with "Mozilla...").

in case your spider doesn't change the user agent string, you might have to base your condition on the ip address or something (although if there were multiple servers that the spider could run from, that wouldn't work).

setup your protected folders first. then, manually go in and edit your .htaccess file. at the top of the file, insert the following:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*freefind.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]

the first line says that if the user_agent string (that you would see in your server access log) has the word "freefind" in it, then perform the rewrite rule specified in the next line. i'm not quite sure what that rewrite rule does, and it really doesn't matter. i just copied it from the automatically generated section directly below in the .htaccess file. basically you just want that line to be identical to the line that amember would generate.

the only caveat is that if you modify your protected folder settings in amember, it will give you an error message saying that there's some unrecognizable code. so if you want to change something, you'll have to temporary remove these lines, make the changes in amember, then put the lines back in.

sorry if that is confusing. read the apache mod_rewrite documentation for more info: http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html

mkm

Has there been any further development on this?

I need a search tool for the subscriber side of my site.
www.tripswithkidz.com

Thanks!

PS, If no, is a search tool being worked on as a future feature for amember?

I use carzoogle and it works well for me. Protected pages are searched.
Tom

Thanks!

Since posting, I did figure out how to get Freefind to work with aMember, too:

After this line:

Code:

RewriteEngine On

Add this:

Code:

#Allow access for FreeFind spider
RewriteCond %{http_user_agent} ^.*freefind.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L]

I use Zoom by Wrensoft:

http://wrensoft.com/

Configure the search engine to scan your local drive where you keep your files (i.e. Dreamweaver, Local site) then upload the results to your production server via FTP. Works every time!