CivicActions

The Minnesota Search Sprint is unofficially over. Earnest, Djun, and Blake have already left. Chad is local, but I've said goodbye to him too. Robert and I leave tomorrow. And David is vacationing a few extra days in sunny Minnesota (because it's warmer than Montreal???).

LIVE FROM THE MINNESOTA SEARCH SPRINT...

The sprint team of Robert Douglass, Blake Lucchesi, Djun Kim, David Lesieur, Chad Fennel, Earnest Berry, and myself, began work at 8am on this uncharacteristically warm sunny May day at the University of Minnesota.

In the spirit of the "Data Sprint," and the "Testing Sprint", Friday 5/9 through Sunday 5/11, we are meeting in what is being dubbed the "Search Sprint" at the University of Minnesota.

The good news is that CivicActions is busy! The bad news is that I had hoped to prepare more, but this date has really snuck up on me. My plane leaves tomorrow, and I've neglected preparing at all. I was asked to write this blog several weeks ago (sorry).

Part one of a six part series on Drupal's search functionality.

This installment will discuss node module's responsibilities in Drupal searching, show how to create contributed modules which take advantage of node module's indexing methods, and discuss some pending patches for improving this flexibility.

Search Module and general search overview

Searching In General

Making it easy for users to find content easily, is one of the most important aspects of any large site. Drupal knows that search is important. Google, who indexes the entire internet, often provides faster and more reliable results, than the Drupal search engine.

I've been working in Drupal full time for about a year now, and searching has become my pet project. I've written five search related modules and submitted numerous patches to core search. Yet this has just scratched the surface.