#179 Search Engine Patch

[Robert Lankford]

This patch does the following:

1) It splits out presentation from search.php into a new search Smarty template. This allows users of Xoops to alter the appearance of their search pages via the template without having to know the gory details of the search process.

2) It creates the concept of 'deep' searching and 'shallow' searching.

Shallow searching exhibits the behavior that Xoops' search has always exhibited. Namely, the initial search results page only searches for a few hits in each module and presents those hits on a module-by-module basis. The user cannot determine how many results are actually to be found in any given module without drilling down into the hits for that module.

Deep searching, on the other hand, determines the number of hits for every module. The initial search page still groups the hits by module (and still limits those shown to a small number), but the user immediately sees how many total hits are available. Drilling down into the results for a given module then displays a 'page nav' interface instead of the 'next/previous' nav buttons.

3) The initial search page sorts the modules by number of hits returned. Modules with fewer hits are oriented toward the bottom of the page.

[Robert Lankford]

Search Patch Zip File