Tag Archives: Autocomplete

My first WordPress plugin

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Hey,

I am very proud to present you, my first plugin for WordPress platform – Autocompleter.

The plugin adding autocomplete functionality for the search input field of your blog. The values are the tags and categories existing in the blog and this way you will help your visitors to find easily the proper information in your blog.

My first implementation was with Prototype and Script.aculo.us, but because I like very much jQuery library and I found a wonderful plugin for autocomplete, I build it with jQuery.

You can check the demo in this blog – top right – search box 🙂

Hope you will like it and you will vote for it 🙂 Thanks

The official page is: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/autocompleter

Adding autocomplete field for search in WordPress

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Added a nice Autocomplete field of the search box in that blog /top right/. It’s really nice to have and I really enjoyed doing it.

I followed that article: How to: Create an Ajax-based Auto-completing Search Field for your WordPress Theme, but instead of using suggested js code, I’ve used Script.aculo.us Autocomplete way.

I really enjoyed and I hope you will like it too.

Update: I’ve wrote a plugin for this: nik.chankov.net/autocompleter/. Enjoy!

Extended Autocomplete Helper

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When I started with CakePHP, my first project includes also Autocomplete functionality for some fields. Of course I start using default Ajax Helper provided from the library. The main problem was that in most of the cases I needed the ID of the string which I searched. The best example is the Country list which is very easy to be accessed with Autocomplete, but instead to messing up with strings as usual developer I wanted to have the ID of the specified country. I used some kind of hack by adding callback function onComplete, which checks the selection in the Autocomplete field, and by this selection set hidden ID field, but as you can imagine this is not the best choice, first of all because it’s a hack – you rely on a sting which already sound as a hack /imagine if you are searching in a list there are some duplicated entries – examples are too many/ and second if you rely on callback this mean that you need another second or two for the second responce. Anyway, by giving this examples just wanted to convince you once again that Autocomplete helper with Key and Value related are really necessary in the projects /or at least that’s what I am thinking./

Well so far the default Autocomplete helper doesn’t provide such functionality. That’s why I created this helper which solves this problem partly. Why partly? You will see the answer of this in Strict Autocomplete with Scriptaculous (Part II)
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Strict Autocomplete with Scriptaculous (Part II)

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These days when I showed my example to some friends I realized that in fact even the second example had potential bugs. In fact not a bug, but missing functionality which could mislead the user while using the component.

What I found: When the user prefer to type instead of selecting the value from the list, then it’s possible to have “nothing selected” in ID field, but in fact the user have feeling that he select the correct value. This is extremely valid when the options are short and typing 3-4 chars which in fact is more convenient to type instead of selecting.
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Autocomplete with strict key=>value pair with Scriptaculous (Part I)

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I am using Scriptaculous for Autocomplete control, but in the example provided there is no way to select strict value.

Let me explain what I mean: Go to autocomplete example and try to select an entry in first group of fields. Well everything looking fine.
Then try to modify the entry, for example remove the last char from the field. and press somewhere on the web page /with the mouse/. Well as you can see this didn’t clear the value from ID field and in the real example, when the ID field is hidden, users could have wrong impression that the field is selected, they change it, but their change is not applied … and the complication occur.
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