Gallery2 Joomla Bridge – Search


In case you haven't read my other posts about search engine optimization, I've been on an SEO kick lately.  I've renamed all my images in the photo gallery so they all have some context now.  Google indexes galleries, but the next step was to be able to search the images from within my own site.  I installed the gallery2 search mambot plugin for joomla, but it wasn't doing anything.  Here's what I did to get it working.

  1. Install the mambot
    -Administrator Backend: Installers > Mambots
  2. Enable the mambot
    -This is the part I was somehow forgetting, but it's critical
    1. Admin Backend: Mambots > Site Mambots
    2. Click the X icon next to the Gallery2 Search mambot to publish it
  3. Change some code that comes default with the Jan 6 release:
    -Go to the searchbot PHP file
    mambots/search/gallery2.searchbot.php

    Look for the code around line 63 like this:
       $info->created = utility::g2DateToMambo($time);

    Change it to this:
      $info->created = utility::formatdate($time);


5 responses to “Gallery2 Joomla Bridge – Search”

  1. I just realized that once I enabled the URL Rewrite module in Gallery2 my SEF urls in the searchbot are incorrect. I think this actually has something to do with my OpenSEF component not firing off on the com_search component though.

    On the other hand, my gallery URLs look awesome now. instead of index.php?com_gallery2&itemId=17&g2_view=view&g2_itemid=1049
    my urls now look like
    /gallery/europe/

  2. So, your link would then be “index2.php?…” – try it now! This has been useful to me when I worked with customers who had a Joomla site and a few non-Joomla sites – this hack was used to pull in lead generation forms and articles for viewing thus avoiding the ‘duplicate content’ worry in your SEO.

  3. I just realized that once I enabled the URL Rewrite module in Gallery2 my SEF urls in the searchbot are incorrect. I think this actually has something to do with my OpenSEF component not firing off on the com_search component though.

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