Little ZOO helpers – Menu Module and Search Plugin

We already talked about the ZOO extensions itself. Also explained its features like the CCK and the catalog system. But to make the ZOO a great extensions we need a seamless integration into Joomla. That's why the ZOO component will also include a menu module and a search plugin.

Seamless menu integration

The ZOO also comes with a menu module which works exactly like Joomla's own menu modules: You can select a catalog and then choose in what depth you want to display its hierarchy levels. Further we took all the great styling possibilities which served us so well in all our templates and put it right into the new ZOO menu module. And here is the really good news for all YOOtheme members: When ZOO is used in combination with a YOOtheme template its menus will look exactly like the template's own menus including the drop-down functionality. So no CSS customizations are needed to make the ZOO menu match your design when using the ZOO combined with a YOOtheme template.

Full-text search

For the ZOO we wanted a search that shows results that matter, so we checked out a couple of ways how to go about it. First we took a look how Joomla handles searching its content articles. It uses a normal string comparison function provided by the database to search all articles stored into Joomla database tables. It works well and everybody used this feature on a Joomla websites. Next we thought about how to improve the search feature to make it better. After spending some time researching other options, we came across that MySQL offers a feature called "full-text search". It comes with "natural language search", a search that is focused on usability by using spoken languages, like English. Sweet! Further all results of a full-text search will be ranked by its relevance, which is based on a score the MySQL database calculates for every matched result. Also, it uses an index to make searching even faster specially when you have large number of articles. The full-text search has been implemented since MySQL version 3.23 and will keep getting developed, so we considered it a good idea to use it. So the ZOO will come with a search plugin which provides full-text searching.

This was our last post about the ZOO features. Next is our March template release, and we are really excited about it. :-)