[wp-hackers] GSOC Idea: Mac Spotlight (or Google Instant) like feature for Wordpress

[Suhas Sharma]

Hi,

I wanted to quickly bounce an idea off you people.

I've been using Wordpress for quite a while, I seem to install a lot of
plugins into my installation, I seem to be lost to find where the setting
pages are for every plugin. Before the jQuery Tab UI (pre 2.9?). I used to
Ctrl/Cmd + F to sort of figure out where they are. After that,  this trick
won't work.

I was thinking we maybe implement a Mac spotlight[1] like autosuggest
feature to find settings quickly. I was thinking of using Levenshtein
distance for the fuzzy matches and then maybe use Jaccard Index to rank
results (like Google Instant?). We could tightly integrate it with the
Settings API. That should help the user to find the specific setting they
are looking for. For eg: ("Feed" would bring up the relavant options like
no. of items, feedburner plugins etc).

I think a simple version can be implemented during the GSOC time period. It
has a lot of scope for optimisation with pre-caching, pre-fetching etc.

[1]
http://lifehacker.com/5807310/use-your-macs-spotlight-function-to-quickly-open-apps-or-settings


Regards,
Suhas