[Jason Levine]

Hi,

I’m using Connections with the CMap template and I’ve run into a problem. The category drop down and search boxes appear, but selecting a category or running the search just refreshes the page. The resulting listings aren’t limited to the category selected or the search performed. I’ve tried changing the permalinks setting on the WordPress site and performing some other actions, but nothing seems to work. Oddly enough, I found that the Connections Categories widget will show me a list of categories that, when clicked, shows only those entries. (The URLs seem to be off the form /connections-page/cat/category-slug/)

What can I do to get searches and category selections working?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jason

Can you please share a link so I can take a look?

[Jason Levine]

Unfortunately, the site is within our network. There’s no way to provide outside access. I can post some screenshots, though, if that would help.

That said, I’ve solved one of my problems. I disabled all plugin on my site (except for Connections-related plugins) and the drop down Category list began working again. I slowly re-activated the plugins until I found one (404 Redirected) that was causing the problem. (Which makes sense in hindsight since this plugin grabs URLs that WordPress doesn’t recognize… which includes the URLs generated by Connections for the category drop down.)

Unfortunately, search is still not working. Disabling that plugin has given me some progress. The URL is now displaying properly. Searching for “hospital” now gives me “/services-directory/?cn-s=hospital&cn-cat=” instead of just “/services-directory/” (the page that this is on). However, the results include all items, not just items with “hospital” in the name. Any ideas for debugging this?

[Steven Zahm]

@ Jason

What are the options that are checked on the Connections : Search admin page under the Search tab?

I had one user a while back run into a similar issue. The cause was the query variables were being stripped off by the server even though they showed in the browser address bar. The solution ended up being something that was set or need set in the .htaccess file. I wasn’t told what the actual solution was unfortunately.

Something else to try.

Open the page in Chrome and hit the F12 key and click the Network tab. See if the page is being redirected. You’ll know because you should see a 301 or 302 response code in one or more rows of the results.

[Jason Levine]

I just figured out the search as well. Since my test site runs on IIS6, I had to use the Custom Errors section to get pretty permalinks working. Unfortunately, this turned my URL from:

http://123.45.67.89/services-directory/cn-s=test&cn-cat=

to:

http://123.45.67.89/index.php?404;http://123_45_67_89:80/services-directory/?cn-s=test&cn-cat=

When this is broken up into query string parameters, “404;http://123_45_67_89:80/services-directory/?cn-s” is recorded as one parameter (with a value of “test”). Thus, the search string (“cn-s”) is always found to be blank.

To fix this, I added an extra hidden form field in CMap.php’s formOpen function.

echo ‘<input type=”hidden” name=”x” value=””>’;

This will make the first parameter “404;http://123_45_67_89:80/services-directory/?x&#8221; and the “cn-s” parameter will appear properly.

Our live site will be IIS7 so there might be a better workaround there. I figured I’d post this in case someone else ran into the same difficulties.

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