Some of our visitors have complained that they cannot find restaurant reviews through the search form. We can fix this by writing a search plug-in to scan the reviews along with the results for content. Create a file name/plugins/search/reviews.php, and add the following code to it:

<?php
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
jimport( 'joomla.plugin.plugin' );
class plgSearchReviews extends JPlugin
{

In contrast to our content plug-in, for the search plug-in we are extending the JPlugin class instead of calling the registerEvent() member function of the mainframe object. This is a newer method of constructing plug-ins, that is becoming the preferred method.

To start using this style, jimport('joomla.plugin.plugin') is called to load the plug-in code into memory. After this, a class is defined that extends JPlugin. The name format for this class starts with plg, continues with a capitalized form of the plug-in group name (in this case Search), and ends...