[wp-hackers] Page searching examples [was: 2.4 planning discussion]

[Casey Bisson]

> 8. Page searching
> 	Action: see what people expect
> 	Action: see what plugins are doing

A few examples from one of my own projects. This first link brings up  
a search for "history," showing both a page and entries from our  
catalog (library catalog content lives in $wpdb->posts as post_type =  
"scrib"):
http://www.plymouth.edu/library/search/history

This search returns a mix of pages and posts (i.e. no catalog content):
http://www.plymouth.edu/library/search/history&scope=blog

All results are shown relevance ranked; relevance ranking and the  
faceted searching are supported by my plugins. The intermingling of  
all these content types in a single list is one of the most praised  
features, especially in the first example. Whatever happens in core,  
I'd like to preserve the ability to get this sort of combined result  
list.

Related: As I was trying to integrate pages in the search, the most  
important thing I found is that the automatically generated excerpts  
for pages are usually pretty bad. I ended up adding the excerpt field  
to the page editor so folks could write their own excerpts (though  
you'll also see my plugin is automatically inserting a list of  
sections of the page in the excerpt in some/many of these examples).

Colophon: The site has over 330,000 items in $wpdb->posts, including  
about 150 Pages. Scriblio and bSuite Core are the two major plugins  
that make that site work (both are broken in 2.3, I'm working on that).
http://about.scriblio.net/about/
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/bsuite/core

--Casey Bisson