drop-down pre-selected search terms?

[katiediddesign]

I am creating a search page, and I want to offer pre-selected search terms in drop-down boxes. ie: Customer can select "red" from one drop-down, and "shirt" from another, and then click "search" and the search function will return those items that have "red" and "shirt"... just as it would if you typed "red shirt" into the default search box.

 

I am a newbie to PHP and OSCommerce, and slowly starting to become familiar with the code. I'm thinking that this wouldn't be too hard to do, and would therefore be a good learning project to start on... but I find that I still need a little direction to get me going. Would anyone here be kind enough to give me that direction?

 

Thanks in advance...

[katiediddesign]

Actually checkboxes for terms (so they can easily select more than one term) would work great, too... might be a little better.

 

Am I right in thinking that at least part of this needs to be done on this page:

advanced_search.php

 

I don't have to be able to access or change the options from admin... I'll only have to do it once.

[katiediddesign]

Can anyone help me with this? Should this be as simple as coding the form input with the search terms and checkboxes and with new attribute names (or whatever it's called), and then altering the search code to search for the terms in all those boxes, instead of just the text input box?

 

If no-one knows for sure, does anyone understand how the search feature of OSCommerce works?