Looking to the future... searching in articles

[JPDeni]

I know I saw somewhere that way down the road (probably in release 1.0) there will be a search function that will work on articles. I am content to wait for it if it's what I need, but if it's not, I'll go ahead and program my own search function.

Here's what I've got...

In the existing website that I'm moving over, we have a bunch of magazine articles, interviews, transcripts and such. At the moment, they're housed in a database and are searchable through a form. In the new SMF/TP site that I'm switching to, I copied the database table and used a TP php article to display the items. I've not yet written a search function or an editor for them.

If the new search function will have allowances to only search a certain category of articles rather than every TP article, I won't write my own search function and I'll switch from my database of items to creating individual articles for each item in my database. It'll take a bit of doing, but it would probably end up really nice and would have the editor all nicely built in. If, however, the proposed search function will not be selectable, I'll go ahead and write the search function now, and write an item editor when .9x becomes available with a nicer editor than TP has now.

So, what I'm asking is if anyone knows whether the proposed search function is going to be able to be limited to a category of articles, selectable by the admin. No point in duplicating effort unless it's absolutely necessary. 

[elpvn]

I agree at all, we need a solution to support those features, so we will ...

[G6Cad]

Look at the roadmap

[JPDeni]

I did look at the roadmap. What it says is

search within articles/modules

I got that. I just want to know how narrow we're going to be able to set the search. I have a number of other TP articles that I would not want returned from a search of my items. I've got all sorts of pages that use TP articles, but are not what I would consider an "article" -- I've got some games, my own image gallery, a separate page for the gallery editor, my site map and other pages that I would not want included in the search. I will only want one category of articles to be searchable.

Maybe I should reword my question: Will we be able to exclude some pages from the search?

Or maybe I should make it a suggestion, instead of a question: When the search is written, I would suggest that it be made so that the admin can exclude designated articles from the search.

[bloc]

The plan is to make articles permission-based..or rather categories. Search will then need to take that into account. So yes, it will be possible.

[JPDeni]

Thank you. I'll hold off as long as I can, then. If I end up doing some programming that I don't need, well, I figure I've still learned something, so nothing's lost.

[JPDeni]

The plan is to make articles permission-based..or rather categories. Search will then need to take that into account. So yes, it will be possible.

I hate to be a pain, but can I ask for a little more clarification? It seems that you're saying that the categories will be permission-based and that the search will take into account the permission that the user has. That's different than what I need.

If things go as I hope they will I'll have a whole bunch (200+) items in a "Text" category of pages. I also have a "Features" category of pages which includes some little games, some pages about the site and some other things. All users will have permission to view both of these categories, but I want the search to only search within the "Text" category.

Maybe that's what you said it'll be and I'm just too dense to understand. 

[bloc]

Its actually both - I did not speicfy that enough I guess. Think SMF search..you can set what boards to search - but only the ones you have access to.

[JPDeni]

Okay. Thanks. I am a bit dense, and I really appreciate your patience with all the questions you get.