Drupal 6: Implementing visual search results with search lucene and lightbox2

I created a Drupal site to host my photography in CCK Imagefield nodes and used Lucene to enhance my search functionality. By default Drupal’s search results are text-based so I decided to add some code to show image thumbnails in my search results. I checked out Drupal Lucene’s hooks and decided to implement a hook_luceneapi_result_alter() function in my existing module.

<?php
function MYMODULE_luceneapi_result_alter(&$result, $module, $type = NULL) {

  // check for node results
  if ($type == 'node') {

    // check node type
    if ($result['node']->type == 'image') {

      // define an imagecache image path for image thumbnail
      $imagecache_path_thumbnail = file_directory_path() . '/imagecache/thumbnail' . str_replace(file_directory_path(),'',$result['node']->field_image[0]['filepath']);

      // define an imagecache image path for image (large)
      $imagecache_path_large = file_directory_path() . '/imagecache/large' . str_replace(file_directory_path(),'',$result['node']->field_image[0]['filepath']);

      // define theme_image() variables
      $alt = check_plain($result['node']->title);
      $title = check_plain($result['node']->title);
      // add rel=lightbox to enable lightbox2 module
      $attributes = array(
        'rel' => 'lightbox',
      );
      // let imagecache define the size
      $getsize = FALSE;
      // generate the image hml
      $image_html = theme('image', $imagecache_path_thumbnail, $alt, $title, $attributes, $getsize);

      if ($image_html) {

        // define lightbox link
        $image_link = l(
          $image_html,
          $imagecache_path_large,
          array(
            'html' => true,
            'attributes' => array(
              'rel' => 'lightbox',
            )
          )
        );

        // add data to the result variable, passed by reference
        $result['image_thumbnail'] = $image_link;

      }

    }

  }

}
?>

The above code adds additional data to my search results variables. I then implemented a hook_preprocess_search_result() function in my theme’s template.php file to pass this data to the search-result.tpl.php template file.

<?php
function MYTHEME_preprocess_search_result(&$variables) {

  // ...snip...

  // check for lucene node search results
  if ($variables['type']=='luceneapi_node') {

    // check for image
    if ($variables['result']['image_thumbnail']) {

      // pass additional data to theme template file
      $variables['image_thumbnail'] = $variables['result']['image_thumbnail'];

    }

  }

}
?>

And in my theme’s search-result.tpl.php template file, I added the following PHP to show the new variable.

<div class="search-result <?php print $search_zebra; ?>">

  <?php if($image_thumbnail): ?>
    <?php print $image_thumbnail; ?>
  <?php endif; ?>

  <!-- ...snip... -->

I also added a few lines of CSS in my theme’s style.css file to tidy up the layout.

.search-results.luceneapi_node-results .search-result {
  clear: both;
}

.search-results.luceneapi_node-results .search-result img {
  float: left;
  margin: 0px 20px 20px 0px;
}

The visual results can be seen here on my photo gallery.

Eric London