I need to modify the Joomla search component to make it search also by K2 author name in my Joomla 2.5 website. Because normally, since the author name isn't included within the item's body or title, it doesn't return any results. I just don't know which files to modify and if anyone could provide me with an example code on how to implement it, I'd be immensely thankful.

Regards

Hi. You need to make a search plugin for this. You can see how the Search - Articles plugin works.

Is there any existing plugin that provides that feature? Can you give me a link to its download page? If not, I think I'm better off modifying the code to add that option, rather than creating a new plugin, which I don't have sufficient knowledge for. Please elaborate a bit more on this matter.

Thank you
Mahmoud

I hope I can get a little more information on this, as it doesn't make sense to search by an author's name and get no results.

Unfortunatelly there is no easy and quick way to do this. The plugin is located at /plugins/search/k2/k2.php in case you are talking about Joomla! search. You need to know SQL to achieve this. You need to JOIN with #__users table and add a condition to the user's name.