Setting Up Site Search

Mega Menu 3.0 simplifies the process of implementing a site-wide search tool by seamlessly integrating with Concrete CMS's core Search block. This integration provides a powerful yet user-friendly way to enhance your site's usability and user experience without compromising your site's performance or aesthetic appeal.

To add the search functionality, navigate to Insert > Site Search and select your desired options. The key setting here is Search Placement, which determines where the search tool appears within your menu structure. See section: Anatomy of Mega Menu.

The Search Style option allows you to customize the search tool, choosing between a sleek inline search and a space-saving drop-down menu. This flexibility ensures that the tool aligns perfectly with your site's design goals and user interface preferences.

Setting up a search results page is crucial, and the search tool will not operate correctly without it. Follow these steps to create a search results page:

Note: If you have a multilingual site, these steps must be repeated for each language.

1. Navigate to Dashboard > Sitemap /dashboard/sitemap/full

2. Click the “Home” page at the top of the tree, choose Add Page and then the page type “Page”.

3. Fill in the settings as desired. Assigning a name of “Search Results” and using a “Full” Page Template is recommended.

4. Click the green Edit Mode button at the bottom.

5. The new page will be loaded. Click the pencil “edit page” icon in the top left to place the page into edit mode.

6. In the “main” editable area add a block called “Search”. Leaving all the default values will work fine, and click the “Add” button. It’s normal that the page will not contain much content at this point.

7. Click the “edit page” pencil icon again in the top left, and click Publish Page. Your new search results page has been created.

8. It’s best practice to hide the search results page from the user navigation system and search engines. This can be done by editing the Page Attributes from Sitemap /dashboard/sitemap/full. Click the new “Search Results” page and choose “Attributes”. On the left panel, locate and set the following fields:

• Exclude From Nav: checked
• Exclude From Page List: checked
• Exclude From sitemap.xml: checked
• Exclude From Search Index: checked

9. Lastly, navigate to the page containing your Mega Menu block and edit it. Go to Insert > Site Search and locate the Search Results Page field. Click the Choose Page button and locate your new “Search Results” page on the Sitemap. Remember to test the Mega Menu search tool to ensure your search results page is configured correctly.

If you have a multilingual site, the core Search block will only search the currently active site tree (i.e. the current language). A separate search results page must be configured for each language tree in Sitemap. It is also best practice to have separate Mega Menu blocks for each language on your site for maximum flexibility. See section: Setting Up a Multilingual Website.

If the search results show outdated content, try manually running the “Reindex Content” task in the Dashboard dashboard/system/automation/tasks.