Search Form Zen, Using jQuery, with Wordpress and Drupal Examples

January 6, 2009 | 1 comment

In one of my earliest blog posts, I described an approach to customizing a search form that I employ on many of my sites. Instead of having a search form that consists of three elements: a label, text input field, and submit button, I like to reduce everything to just the text field with the label inside it, as you can see on the right hand column of this very blog. This frees up room, and requires less mouse work on the part of the user.

I originally saw this basic functionality on the Mambo CMS site, and because I don’t like to needlessly duplicate work (otherwise known as laziness), I decided to completely and shamelessly rip off their source.

More recently, however, I have been using jQuery and have been moving toward implementing Javascript unobtrusively, and so, I decided to explore re-implementing this approach accordingly.