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To configure Zoom to work with NOF, we need to do three things:
- Create a Zoom folder under our NOF project folder so that we have a custom place for Zoom to store the output files created for this website.
- Create a custom Zoom configuration file for our website
- Configure Zoom to use our folder and the files created by NOF.
Step 1: Creating a folder to store the files created by Zoom
Before we start the Zoom indexing program, we need to create a folder called Zoom under our NOF project file folder. Then we will configure Zoom to place the files that it generates for this website in that folder.
Hint: This extra step will make sure that you are always publishing the correct Zoom files for your website.
Use Windows Explorer to navigate to the NOF project folder for your website, then create a new folder there called Zoom. In our example, the new folder that we created was:
C:\NetObjects Fusion 7.5\User Sites\LANSRAD\Zoom
Step 2: Creating a Custom Zoom Configuration file for your website
Start the Zoom Indexer program using the desktop shortcut or the entry under Programs.
Important: As soon as the program starts, the VERY FIRST THING that you want to do is to create a new configuration file for the website you are working on.
To do this, click File, then Save Configuration As... from the Zoom pulldown menu. Then navigate to the NOF project folder under User Sites for this website. When you have the correct folder selected, change the name of the Zoom configuration file to the name of the website you are indexing.
In this example we are indexing the LANSRAD website, so we navigated to
C:\NetObjects Fusion 7.5\User Sites\LANSRAD and changed the name to be LANSRAD.zcfg.
Hint: In the future when we want to start Zoom to index this website we will just double-click this file. Windows will load Zoom with these settings. This is a better option than using the desktop shortcut since it makes sure that Zoom has the correct configuration file.
If you do use the desktop shortcut, then the FIRST thing you would need to do (before indexing any website or making any changes) would be to LOAD the zcfg file for the website you are working on.
Step 3: Configuring Zoom to work with this NOF website
When the Zoom indexing program starts from the desktop shortcut you see this screen:
(note that Zoom defaults to www.myswebsite.com when it is not using a custom configuration)
Before we can use the Zoom index program, we need to configure it for our NOF website and select the options we want to use for indexing.
As mentioned earlier, Zoom can index your website from the Internet or from the LOCAL PUBLISH. The type of indexing that suits you best will depend on your website and how it is used. Since all of our content comes from our local copy of NetObjects Fusion we are going to let Zoom build our indices from the content generated in the LOCAL PUBLISH.
This method will also make it easy for us to be sure that our search results template file (generated by NOF when we did the LOCAL PUBLISH) is always up to date with our other web pages.
Note: Even if you are building your Zoom indices from the Internet, you should still PUBLISH LOCAL BEFORE you run Zoom to make sure that your search results page is up to date.
To make sure that we can run Zoom in either index mode at any time, we are going to configure both the Zoom Spider Mode (used for indexing from the Internet) and the Zoom Offline Mode (used for indexing from our LOCAL PUBLISH files). Once saved we need not change these settings unless the file locations change.
Configuring the Zoom Spider Mode
Since we want to index the LANSRAD website, we have edited the Base URL to the LANSRAD domain and also set the Start spider URL to the index.html page. We have also selected the PHP platform and set that to be the location where Zoom will create our output files to the Zoom folder under our LANSRAD project folder in NOF. The resulting configuration looks like this:
Configuring the Zoom Offline Mode
On the Offline Mode tab we need to set the following information:
Start Directory
We use the browse box to set this to the LOCAL PUBLISH directory of our website. In our example this would be:
C:\NetObjects Fusion 7.5\User Sites\LANSRAD\Local Publish
Base URL
We set this to the Internet URL for our website, In our example this would be:
http://www.lansrad.com
Output Directory
We use the browse box to set this to the Zoom folder that we created under our NOF project folder for this website. In our example this would be:
C:\NetObjects Fusion 7.5\User Sites\LANSRAD\Zoom
We also make sure that the PHP platform is selected for the Offline Mode.
Next we will click the configure button to complete our two-way relationship between NOF and Zoom and to make some changes in the Zoom settings:
Click the Advanced tab and check the box that says you want to specify the locations for the HTML template. Then use the browse box to select the HTML location BELOW the LOCAL PUBLISH folder for your website. In the case of our example this would be:
C:\NetObjects Fusion 7.5\User Sites\LANSRAD\Local Publish\html
Note: This is a VERY important step and your search results page will not work correctly unless you set this value. You also have to remember to PUBLISH LOCAL at least one time so that the page is generated by NOF.
Note: Be sure that your HTML Template Path is to the HTML folder below the local publish. If it is not then you will get an error that Zoom can’t find your search_template_src.html
Hint: If you get errors from Zoom that it can not find the search_template_src.html file, it is most likely that you either did not select the \html folder, or you forgot to Publish Local before starting your indexing.
Since we did not make any changes to the search scripts, we leave those set to their default location. The resulting screen looks like this:
You can then click to the other tabs as needed to set any other Zoom search parameters. You can adjust the other settings of Zoom to suit your preferences. This is just an example of the ones that we used in this example. Please refer to the Zoom documentation for detailed instructions.
Saving our custom Zoom configuration
VERY IMPORTANT:
Click FILE and then Save Configuration after you click OK to update your custom Zoom settings before you exit Zoom or before you start the indexing process.
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Using the Zoom Search Engine with NetObjects Fusion
