V7 Alpha release available for testing

[wrensoft]

Zoom V7 development update

An alpha release of Zoom V7 is now available for testing.

The new features available in the current build include,

New features in V7 Alpha 1

• Autocomplete search box: As you type in the search box, suggestions based on popular searches will appear to autocomplete the query ("Configure"->"Autocomplete")
• Date range searching: You can now specify a date range at search time with a dropdown date selection box. ("Configure"->"Search Page"->"Enable Date Range searching")
• Improved ASP.NET Server Control supporting postbacks and viewstates (download V7 ASP.NET Server Control below). Only needed if you are using the ASP.NET platform option.
• Email file formats now supported (.PST, .MBOX, .DBX, .EML, .MSG). Useful for Intranet search engines.
• URL indexing: Now indexing the URL (domain name) and the path (folder names) in the URL. ("Configure"->"Indexing options")
• Search by site: Now supporting "site:" and "url:" search syntax, e.g. a search for "beagle site:mydogs.com" will search for all beagles on the mydogs.com domain only.
• Domain diversity: Ensure the first 3 results come from different domains ("Configure"->"Search Page"). Useful for search engines indexing more than one site.
• Scan files with unknown extensions: Analyzes files of unrecognizable file extensions to determine how to index them. Useful on "deep searching" external web sites.

More features will be added over the next month or two.

Download
Details and a download are can be found on this page,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/v7.html


Upgrades
If you purchase V6 now, or at any time 6 months before the V7 release, then the upgrade to V7 will be free.


Keys
Currently V6 keys will work in the V7 Alpha release. But the Alpha 1 release will expire on 1/Nov/2011. At which time you'll need to come back and get the updated beta release. For the final V7 build, new keys will be required.

[Ray]

Some usage notes on the new features.

Date picker popup selector (zoom_datepicker.js)
This is a Javascript that can be used by Zoom to provide a date selector popup window in your search form. This is necessary if you have enabled date range searching (to find pages within a certain date range).
Simply enable the option in the Indexer ("Configure"->"Search page"->"Enable Date Range searching") and re-index. Then upload "zoom_datepicker.js" to the same folder that you have uploaded your search files to so that it is in the same folder as your ZDAT files. That should be all you need to do.

If you are unable to host the "zoom_datepicker.js" files in the same folder as the search files (for example, if you are using CGI and your "cgi-bin" folder does not allow ".js" files to be hosted), then you will need to specify an alternative path for the date picker script ("Configure"->"Advanced"->"AlternateDatePicker path"). You will need to re-index for this change to take effect. Then, you will need to upload the "zoom_datepicker.js" file to the folder specified by your custom path.

Date picker default CSS file (zoom_datepicker.css)
This is a default CSS file for the date picker popup selector described above. You can simply link to this CSS file where you want to use the date picker control (e.g. search_template.html or search.html) with a tag such as this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="zoom_datepicker.css" type="text/css">
Alternatively, you can simply copy the contents of this file and paste it into your own CSS file or the <style>...</style> section of your page. Of course, you can modify the CSS here to customize the appearance of the date picker window.

[Ray]

Autocomplete
This can be found under "Configure"->"Autocomplete".

When this is enabled, the list of words here will be suggested in real-time as they type into the search box.

It is most effective if you check the option to "Include top x most popular search terms from Statistics log file" and provide it with a file path or URL to the statistics log file (created in "Configure"->"Advanced").

It will create an additional .zdat file, "zoom_autocomplete.zdat", and also include a "zoom_autocomplete.js" file in the output folder. These files must all be uploaded to the server along with your other index files.

There is also a "zoom_autocomplete.css" file which defines the appearance of the autocomplete dropdown box. You can also adjust this accordingly.

The feature will work best if A) you have a server that is fairly fast and B) there is reasonable low latency between the client and the server. If you have a slow machine with high latency means that auto-complete might not keep up with the user's typing speed.

This feature is also know as auto-suggest.

[Ray]

Additional parameters for Automatic login:
Under "Configure"->"Authentication" you can now specify additional parameters besides just the login and password. This is important if your authentication mechanism requires extra parameters to identify that a "Login" button was pressed instead of a "Register" button, for example. So if it needs an extra parameter named "btnPressed" with a value of "Login" and perhaps another parameter named "formSel" with a value of "2" then the additional parameter field should be specified as "btnPressed=Login&formSel=2".

[Josiahjg]

Autocomplete is a great idea! Suggestion: Allow for META tag includes for autocomplete entries, this would allow product names or codes to be included in the autocomplete list

[sguptaca]

Auto complete will be great feature for sure.

Every body would like it and would help to multiply your market.

However, scheduling feature needs to be improved so as to work smoothly with plesk panel.

[wrensoft]

You can find details about scheduling here.
Q. How do I schedule Zoom to automatically index on a regular basis?

[Ray]

V7 Alpha 2 has been released. It will expire 1/March/2012. You can download from here.

As before, a new build will be available from here on or before the expiry date.

[IanL]

I'm no expert, so this may have already been addressed. But will the new version have a drop down box feature. For instance if I wanted to allow searches to select a country first, will there be an option to have this.

[wrensoft]

There is already a categories feature in V6 that will allow a drop down selection.