Forum OpenACS Development: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages

Installing search is a multistep process but once you have everything installed it works fine with OpenACS5.

There is installation documnentation with the package and here is some additional documentation from Dave Bauer.

http://www.thedesignexperience.org/openacs/openfts-031

I worked on this version of the site-wide-search package about 2 years ago and it was very broken especially if you added more than a couple of dozen rows.

I recently played with search for Oracle again. See the results here: OpenACS Search proposal. Development is on hold till I get at least some funding.

Your best bet is to take ACES' site-wide-search which is imho the best freely availabe OpenACS/ACS site-wide-search implementation and port it to OpenACS5.

Here's the bit that I experienced (I worked on it as well):

* Its performance with real-life amount of data was simply awful.

* It didn't work with umlauts.

* It has a lot of weird, weird code like if's that are always true, dynamic
  ddl, abstraction layers etc.

Given that no-one has worked on it for more than two years it should be even
more useless to use it. E.g. it still indexes the forums packages which has
been deprecated a long time ago.

The ACES solution is the ACS3 solution which has worked in this way or another
on many ACS-backed sites, I worked about two years with it and I find it
pretty reasonable, so I think it is sound approach to port it.

But (as posted here or somewhere else on openacs.org): Work is on hold anyway.

At each new release I install the packge, and expect it will work, but it doesn't. I guess it's easier for end users not have an option to install.

I understand your enthousiasm, and it would indeed be a great contribution if the would exist. At the same time it would save people a lot of frustration trying to figure out why it doen's work,

Cheers

Ben
p.s Have been playing with 5 for quite some time now, and realy like what you've put yogether, a great job !!!

I have only random thoughts currently that need to be structured and funneled into a document. Some of which have to do with I18N which isn't a problem in aiesec, but will be one for OpenACS. See my posts on the danger-head-unstable thread which are search-driven.

There are more random bits. E.g. not only find the package for an object easily, but also the community or subsite so that you can show the "foo meeting in the bar club".

Right now, site_node information, including URL is stored in an NSV array. If we expand that to include any parent_id, site_node, cr_folder, etc, calculating a URL is as simple as retreiving the url of the parent and appending the url of the object to the end.

Right now, some packages do this in an ad_hoc way with an index.vuh file that figures out an object_id and returns a template. If there is a site-wide object hierarchy this can be centralized, probably handled by the request processor directly.

To allow an object to appear at more than one URL, something similar to cr_symlinks could be used.

I will be exploring how all this works in a content management context and I will try to see how it can be applied site-wide. I believe that if this type of function is enabled, it will not break any existing code, it will just allow more consistent use of pretty urls and make services such as search, categories, and notifications easier to write and to use.

very interesting comment that you never got the INSO filters running with 8.1.7.0.1.

Do you have an idea where to download the patch from 8.1.7.0.1 to 8.1.7.0.3, or where to get a binary?

And yes, we're planning to index files a lot for a project we've got running...

Bests,
Frank

mailto:frank_dot_bergmann_at_project-open_dot_com
http://www.project-open.com/