Today I was working on implementing search on a customers website I am doing in the DotNetNuke CMS.  At first I thought this would be automatic and mostly set up.  I instead found that I needed to adjust some thing, so I have put together a small blog entry to help other out who may be having similar issue setting up their blogs.

I have below the three biggest keys to search success on your DotNetNuke site and in your DNN skins.

First, Skinning to include Search

The first thing to do is to include the Register TagPrefix at the top of your .ascx skin file as shown below.

<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="SEARCH" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Search.ascx" %>

Second, Add the control to your skin.

Figure out where you want the search bar to be and place the following code inside your html markup.

<dnn:SEARCH runat="server" id="dnnSEARCH"  CssClass="dnn_search" UseDropDownList="true" Submit="<img src=&quot;images/search.png&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; alt=&quot;Search&quot; /&gt;" />

Attributes explained

• CssClass  (is used in the CSS style sheet to style your search box)
• UseDropDownList  (used if you want a dropdown web/site pick menu within the search box)
• If you don’t want a drop down menu just don’t include this attribute
• Submit  (is used to replace the words submit with an image)
• ShowWeb (false or true)(used to hide web from search options)(default true)
• ShowSite (false or true)(used to hide or show site from search options)(default true)

Third, Make sure the Search Results module is on the Search Results page.

This seems like a no brainer and it is usually set up for you.  If you are not getting any search results, go to your admin menu and select pages.  Once on your pages list go to the Search Results page and make sure to add the Search Result module just like you would any module to the content area you want the search results to display in.

That is about it.  It is not overly hard to add search to your skins in DotNetNuke.