I am building a site where I need to control the search results to a greater degree than I can with SimpleSearch.
I would like some feedback from those of you that used MSearch2. What functionality will I gain and have you been happy with it? What is the learning curve? (the translated docs are not always easy to understand)
Thanks
Roy
I’m not familiar with MSearch2, but take a look at CustomSearch, which I think will give you finer control of what is searched and allows regular expression searches.
At the bottom of that page, there’s info on using CS in code.
bobray,
CustomSearch looks nice. I like what you did at Words Matter | Quotations. My biggest concern is having to write custom php for each search on the site. We do have a developer that mainly writes java and javascript apps to work with other library applications. He would need to get up to speed on MODX and php (which he rarely uses).
Roy
FWIW, the WordsMatter code was written a long time ago and doesn’t use CustomSearch. For that, I tried to reverse engineer Google’s search system. I wish the ability to block our certain results with -term were available in a lot more search systems.
I’ve implemented mSearch2 on one client site and was quite pleased with it. Especially combined with mFilter you can build quite powerful searches for complex sites. I was meaning to write an article on MODX.today about it, but that seems to have slipped off my radar.
Basic usage of mSearch just requires placing the search form and snippet on a resource. I think you also need to run the indexing once through the CMP; after that it’ll listen to changes to resources to update the index automatically.
mSearchForm also provides a ready-to-go autocomplete dropdown on the search form, which is a nice addition.
Well worth it IMO!
Mark,
Thanks for the information on mSearch2. I think it is a good choice for our site. Adding the mFilter faceting capability could be useful.
Did you utilize the synonyms and dictionary features?
Roy
I did not - even though the site was in Dutch it seemed to operate good enough with the standard English dictionary.