CUNY Academic Commons

I'm finding this to be an increasingly needed feature the longer the Commons is in existence. If you go to one of your private groups and want to find a forum topic that addressed a specific issue, there is no way to find it. As forums grow, this will become a more pressing issue for our members.

Moved this to the 1.4 milestone; Boone, please let me know whether that is impossible.

Boone, please let me know whether that is impossible.

Nothing's impossible, but it will take a lot of work. I would rather not delay the 1.4 release any more than it already has been. I'd like to move forward under the assumption that this will not go into 1.4, but if 1.4 is held up for some independent reason, and we have time to move it back into the milestone, we'll do so.

I think we should consider making this a more general Group search that would search not just through forums, but also docs. It can be hard to remember whether a conversation happened in a forum thread or under a doc. This feature is particularly important for private groups, I think, since they're not (to my knowledge, at least) covered by the google search.

We'll get this for free when we move to bbPress 2.x. I'm hoping that this'll come in CAC 1.6.

A first pass at a sort of groups "omnisearch" is now running on cdev. Use the "search groups" box at the upper right of http://cdev.gc.cuny.edu/groups/.

It's currently searching the following:
- group names and descriptions
- forum posts and topic names
- Docs content

Results are limited to those items that your user has access to. So you will see results from hidden groups that you're a member of, etc.

In cases where you match a Doc or Forum post/topic, excerpts are displayed inline, where you'd normally see the group description. Only the first three matches in a given group are displayed.

Results are currently expressed in a very group-centric way. That is, you search for "boone", and you are shown a list of groups that match "boone" in one way or other, with a gloss as to what the matches are. This may not be the way that people want this to work. Instead, they may want a results-centric results page, where the associated group is merely a piece of metadata associated with results. However, this introduces a number of questions regarding how the results should be sorted and displayed. (By focusing on groups, we can use the existing groups directory template, along with the "Order By" dropdown. If we switch to focusing on results, we'll have to sort by date or relevance or something else complicated).

Thoughts are welcome.

Thanks for the feedback.

Chris, I'm reassigning this to you for the time being. We don't currently have a place in the group UI for search. We'll need to have an interface for entering search requests, and an interface for displaying the results. What should this look like? Should Search be a separate group "tab", alongside Files, Members, etc?

Moving this to 1.8 as I've already done most of the work for this.

We don't have much of a standard for search boxes, but I do think we should copy the search box from the People tab and include the help-text "Search forum posts..." so that it's clear that this is for the forum only. Moving it closer to the actual forum listing, rather than above the 'Post New Topic' area would be great too. See attached mock-up.

Looks great, Ray!

It would be nice if the search results could be displayed within the group environment (with the group title and left menu still visible), rather than taking the user out into a general Forms area (see attached for results example).

If that's a large ask, I can create a new ticket for that request and we can mark this as resolved for this release. Definitely not a deal breaker.

Going to mark this as resolved.

I've created a new ticket for group forum search to display within the group layout - #4073.

Thanks everyone!