Site search

19 posts by 7 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: April 1, 2009   (RSS)

Re: [Dave] Site search

Hi, Dave.

As CMSB can't search across more than one section at a time, do you think that Article Manager is a better product if sitewide searching is an issue?

Regards,
Nigel Gordijk

Common Sense Design: User-focused Web design
Tel: 001 519 342 5348 | Web: www.commonsensedesign.net

Re: [NigelGordijk] Site search

By Dave - March 31, 2009

Hi Nigel,

CMSB can search across more than one section at a time with some of the previous functions, it's just very basic at this point.

There's also design/usability issues with how to consistently display different types of data from different sections in the search results.

Article Manager actually only has one section (articles) but with a pulldown (categories) to split articles up into groups. So it's only searching one section anyway.

I'd say evaluate it on a project by project basis.

Hope that helps!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [Dave] Site search

>>There's also design/usability issues with how to consistently display different types of data from different sections in the search results. <<

Sorry, how do you mean? Can't the results pages in both CMSB and AM display the page headings as links? So if someone searches for a particular word, the results page will list all of headings/titles/links to pages that contain that word?
Nigel Gordijk

Common Sense Design: User-focused Web design
Tel: 001 519 342 5348 | Web: www.commonsensedesign.net

Re: [NigelGordijk] Site search

By Dave - March 31, 2009

You might have a website with blog posts, staff bios, product descriptions, upcoming event times. And each section might have specific fields related to the content they store. So when you show search results from all the sections there's usually a field from each that can be used as a title, but not always for the summary (in the search results page). Do you show the bio, the product description? the event description?

And then sometimes people want different content to show differently (product results should have a photo and price, events should show the next date, etc). Which doesn't create a very consistent search page.

The other approach is to do it more like google and have a title and "snippet" of matched keywords and surrounding text from the content that was searched.

It's a issue that has come up a lot of times for custom projects. Another solution we've sometimes done is to have different results grouped by section or tab... Or to have the top 3 results from each section with a link for more.

In any case, I'm talking about searching issue in an abstract sense. Did you have a particular project that you were having a challenge with or were you just curious? We do have the existing multiSearch function which does a lot of the basics.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

Re: [NigelGordijk] Site search

By ross - March 31, 2009

Hi Nigel

When you setup both systems, you'll have an option to say what fields are searched when someone uses the search engine.

Once you get the results page, you can pretty much do whatever you like as long as the HTML all works.

If you just need the results page to display the title of the article and let visitors click those titles to get more details, that's fine. You can do that no problem.

Does that help?
-----------------------------------------------------------
Cheers,
Ross Fairbairn - Consulting
consulting@interactivetools.com

Hire me! Save time by getting our experts to help with your project.
Template changes, advanced features, full integration, whatever you
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Re: [ross] Site search

Hi, Ross.

I think I recall that the search engine in CMSB only does an "and" search if you are searching more than one field, not an "or" search. Is this still the case?

Thanks,
Nigel Gordijk

Common Sense Design: User-focused Web design
Tel: 001 519 342 5348 | Web: www.commonsensedesign.net

Re: [NigelGordijk] Site search

By ross - April 1, 2009

Hi Nigel

CMS Builder does AND searching. You are correct.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Cheers,
Ross Fairbairn - Consulting
consulting@interactivetools.com

Hire me! Save time by getting our experts to help with your project.
Template changes, advanced features, full integration, whatever you
need. Whether you need one hour or fifty, get it done fast with
Priority Consulting: http://www.interactivetools.com/consulting/

Re: [ross] Site search

Thanks, Ross.
Nigel Gordijk

Common Sense Design: User-focused Web design
Tel: 001 519 342 5348 | Web: www.commonsensedesign.net