OpenFTS code is not available yet. We are moving forward to release OpenFTS under the GPL license in the next few days. We have not decided on a date yet but it will be really soon (hopefully, end of next week). OpenFTS is already being used to index
fts.postgresql.org which serves more than 160,000 messages and
www.rambler.ru which serves more than 500,000 documents.
For an OpenACS search solution, we are going to port the site-wide-search package and replace Intermedia functionality with OpenFTS (Dan's TCL scripts). Dan has converted most of perl to tcl and he has integrated in the
nstcl package, so that we have an aolserver type db interface to talk to pg without having to involve aolserver.
We have written an OpenFTS primer which explains most of its functionality and contains other interesting information (e.g. how to write your own parser for OpenFTS, if the default parser does not suit your needs). Hopefully, the OpenACS search solution based on OpenFTS will be available by the end of July (alpha).
Thanks everyone for offering their help. As soon as OpenFTS is released you can contribute your own parsers or dictionaries, write documentation, etc. We might also need help with the integration of OpenACS with OpenFTS. I will post more details in this thread in the next few days.