Contextually related links

[boxoffice]

Hi,

We are running vbulletin and zoom, and we would like to include a list of links to pages from the rest of our site (outside of vbulletin) that may relate to the vbulletin thread.

For example, if a thread is titled 'What TV brand is best?' The user should see links to our pages of TV brand reviews.

I was wondering if there was a way to get Zoom to do this processing? I was imagining I could post the content or title of the thread to zoom somehow, and then zoom looks through its index and returns a result set to the page.

I think I could probably do it using ajax maybe, but I was thinking there may be some native functionality of zoom that could do it.

[wrensoft]

I don't think it is any great problem to get Zoom to perform a search. The problem is getting the input into Zoom from vB and then formatting the output in such a way that it looks OK on the vB page.

You might want to use the CGI option in Zoom becuase a) it is the fastest and b) you can get the output as XML. You could then write some code to parse the XML into a series of links at the bottom of each vB page.

I don't think there is any way to do this without writing new code.

[boxoffice]

Hi guys,

It's been a while since this thread was started, and I was wondering if there was any development in this area.

I am thinking some sort of ajax widget, which queries the zoom cgi (search.cgi) and instead of the cgi returning a page based on the template file, it returns just the results as xml instead.

Do you know of a widget that already exists? Or is there a way to return xml instead of the search template?

thanks

[boxoffice]

Hi I found that if you add &zoom_xml=1 to the end of the querystring

IE -
/search.cgi?zoom_query=searchquerystring&zoom_xml=1

you get the result back as xml.

This is great because I can create my own widget that processes this xml result.
However do you guys know of any pre-made widgets that do something similar?

[wrensoft]

I am not aware of anything that has already been written to do this.