Features

(New features in bold.)

• Optional default value.
• Optional, custom widget title.
• Optional onfocus and onblur listeners.
• Optional, customizable focus and blur colors.
• Custom button value.
• Custom field size.

The built-in search widget has only one of these features, the optional, custom title.

Onfocus and Onblur

In order to use the blur and focus colors, you must enable the onfocus and onblur event listeners. In order to use the listeners, you must specify a default value (otherwise none of this makes sense). Here’s an example:

Bug Fixes

A pretty serious typo meant that none of the internationalization code worked correctly. This has been fixed, and en_US, en_GB, and fr_FR localizations are available. de_DE is coming. If you’d like to translate, there is a .pot file included in the languages directory.

License

Better Search Widget is released under the MIT License. If you use it, or have suggestions for new features or bug fixes, let me know!

Getting It

You can download Better Search Widget 1.1 now in a Zip file. Or, to save yourself some trouble,  you can check it out of Subversion from

svn co svn://jamessocol.com/better-search-widget/tags/1.1.0 ./better-search-widget

(Run that in your wp-content/plugins directory.) Subversion will make it easiest to upgrade later.

Roadmap

Soon, though probably not today, I will be releasing Better Search Widget 2, which will take advantage of the new Widget API in WordPress 2.8. This will add support for multiple instances of the widget, but will require at least WordPress 2.8. You should upgrade, anyway.

I’ll probably start some 2.0 branches tomorrow to take advantage of the new API. I wish I didn’t know how many people don’t keep their WordPress installations up to date, so I wouldn’t care about backwards compatibility.

At least both widgets got nice new, and functional, internationalization (i18n) code and new localization (l10n) files.

And BSW got a good feature update, incorporating some suggestions from Marco Jung, who is also, kindly, doing a German localization, and a few of my own. The built-in search widget has stepped up it’s game, and fixed the thing BSW was originally designed to fix (no widget title) so I have a higher bar to clear to justify the name “Better Search Widget.”

I’ll write up the new features tomorrow.