Search

[Midnight Modding]

The one feature I feel like needs to be improved a lot is searching. For years, I have seemed to always get odd results, which I'd never get in search engines or other software. No results when I knew content existed or a ton of results seemingly irrelevant to the search.

On this site, I would search for marketplace apps that I knew existed and never find them. On my own site, someone spammed me via "Contact Us", so i searched for it by entering "contact" in the acp and it gives no results, so then you have to go through menus finding things. I had never even known that feature existed, but luckily the link ended up being obvious.

It also would be very nice if node titles could be searched. Some apps need a lot of nodes and would be nice to have built in search functionality.

I feel like most everything else is perfect, but somehow search behaves oddly for me over the years. And search working on acp settings is especially useful. (edit: yes I know it does work on some. I haven't even looked into what it searches in there, I assume settings, but not menu items thus nothing for contact us).

[Jennifer M]

 

[Stuart Silvester]

We've introduced many search enhancements (and ElasticSearch) in 4.3. If you haven't already, take a look at this product update: 

 

I couldn't reproduce any issue with searching for the contact us page in the AdminCP, it's the first result shown.

[Adriano Faria]

18 minutes ago, Midnight Modding said:

It also would be very nice if node titles could be searched. Some apps need a lot of nodes and would be nice to have built in search functionality.

Nodes are searchable on ACP:

I mean, it's an extension so the dev needs to add it to their app.

[Midnight Modding]

Thanks! I am in a hurry to go sleep, but for now I glanced over enough of it to see a lot I like. it points out the tricky situation I was mentioning in here, basically, so nice to see that you will now be able to limit it to titles if you want and change whether it includes all terms or any. If it doesn't search the items' container titles, that would be very nice in the future.

[Adriano Faria]

[Midnight Modding]

5 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Nodes are searchable on ACP:

I mean, it's an extension so the dev needs to add it to their app.

I meant on the public side, though. I have a real use for it. Doubt I'll update my reviews app, but that one for sure needed it where you could search titles of the products being reviewed (products were basically like categories... since suite has a review feature, theoretically maybe I could make products content items and implement reviews, but I assume search then woudlnt search reviews)

I have ideas for other future apps, which would benefit form front side node title searches integrated in with item searching. Of course, I could probably figure out how to add it in as an option.

[Adriano Faria]

Container ISN'T a content item so it has absolutelly no sense to be searched.

Or you mean search IN containers? If so:

If you click in a content item that has container, it will show up.

[Midnight Modding]

Read my above posts and you'll see why it makes sense for my needs. The content of my app was a review. So the products were like what are now called nodes. People wanting to search would be wanting to search product names.

I could do a workaround.... like store the node name in each item row and have it consider that the title instead of the real user generated title. (ie, show the user titles, but in the model enter the stored node name as the title field)

Anyway, don't want to get off topic onto all of that, just saying I can think of many app ideas where it makes sense to be able to search node titles along with the content.

[Adriano Faria]

9 minutes ago, Midnight Modding said:

Of course, I could probably figure out how to add it in as an option.

Your best bet.

[Midnight Modding]

4 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Your best bet.

yeah, if there aren't many others who think it would be useful. Or I could do the workaround I mentioned above. That wouldn't be so horrible, basically sort of tricking the class into using the node name as the content item title, but still list reviews by their real titles.

(I hope I wouldn't run into issues due to suite having a feature called reviews. lol. I probably wont update it anyway, because nobody seemed to care about it being updated)

[Ryan Ashbrook]

Nodes don’t necessarily need to be only nodes. In Gallery, for instance, albums are both nodes and content items which allows them to be searchable.

[Midnight Modding]

10 hours ago, Ryan Ashbrook said:

Nodes don’t necessarily need to be only nodes. In Gallery, for instance, albums are both nodes and content items which allows them to be searchable.

I noticed albums were treated differently, but wasn't exactly sure what was going on with them.

For my current app I am working on I also have tricky situations. I have a content item that doesn't need a parent, but if my other content item could be its parent, it would make sense. I asked about it before, but never came across answers yet.

So, for gallery, is it set up where basically an album is a content item added by members and then images are basically content items with a content item parent?

I may look at it and do mine that way, as it would make real sense for mine to be that way... to tie everything together! I'm not sure if I want to go through changing it or not. Currently, what I did was just made them 2 totally different content items and I made a dummy table and dummy row to be the parent node to every row for the content item that didn't need a parent.

(also, in my case the sub-item would not be added by the person who created the main item, but I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem.)

edit: glanced at album, and it looks like more work than it's worth for "this" current app I am doing (a lot of extra code in certain methods), so I'll leave a dummy row as the parent. But if I do another app like I described above, it would be useful, so I'd likely do it for that one.

Could I make separate models using the same db table and use it both ways like that? Also, do I have control over what data is shown in search result for each row?

[bfarber]

You're moving beyond a feature suggestion, but yes you can create a Node model and a Content\Item model class for a single db table (again, this is what Gallery does for albums now). And each content item class can define the template to use and data needed for search results (look at a gallery album search result...it shows a small patchwork of its latest images).

[Midnight Modding]

Searching that is frustrating to me is PM searching... Unless i just haven't noticed an option somewhere, all it does is list conversations with the searched terms and then no link to go directly to the messages or even pages of the conversation where the messages matched.

I have a PM conversation on this very site that has 1,820 messages in it! That would take forever to figure out which page of it has what I am looking for.

Also, topic search being limited to 1 year. (havent checked to see if there are options to change it or if it's forced). I realize why it's limited, but today i actually needed to find a topic over a year back on here.