Dear SilverStripe Community

I would like to set up a forum with SilverStripe 3. Unfortunately, however, searching is currently unsupported. Furthermore it does not look as if that is to change anytime soon. The planned search implementation depends on the Fulltext search module (https://github.com/silverstripe-labs/silverstripe-fulltextsearch), which appears to be nowhere near a state where it could be reliably called upon.

While appearing to provide promising features, the Fulltext search module may be an overkill for many smaller projects. As far as i understand, it will rely on a search server such as Solr or Sphinx, which might pose problematic hosting constraints.

In my opinion, the ability to search a forum is among the essential set of features, a forum should provide. Why has there been no initiative to stick with MyISAM 'Post' and 'ForumThread' Tables and continue using the MySQL Fulltext index for searching. From what I have read, InnoDB in MySQL 5.6 supports Fulltext searching, making the inconvenience of having to use different storage engines a temporary one. And even if the long-term plan was to move away from whatever searching capabilities MySQL offers, wouldn't it be a reasonable temporary solution to use the MySQL index?

If anyone has suggestions for an alternate path, or an argument for why the Fulltext search module is the only sensible way to go, please tell.

I forked the forum module (https://github.com/nbenn/silverstripe-forum/commits/master) and restored very basic searching of post contents. Unfortunately I broke result pagination, the ability to search for authors/thread titles, and possibly other functionality. As will be evident to anyone who wants to look at my modifications, I am a complete beginner (this my first web project). I would therefore be very excited if anyone was interested in helping me.

Hi nbenn,

even though your post is a bit older, I ran across the same issues today.

I am upgrading our website from SS2 to SS3 and the forum does not run perfectly out of the box and sure needs some love...

Being a pragmatical developer, I just used the Google Custom Search. Took about 30 Minutes to implement (the long way, with a separate search results page).

This may not be a valid way for everybody, but I think it should be mentioned here.

Cheers
Ramon

What's the status on search, anyway? This is pretty much the only thing stopping me from using SS for a project (maybe two) that I have in mind.

SS3 has been out for over a year now, and it doesn't look like there's been any real movement on this issue. And is the fulltext search module requirement a definite? Introducing a search engine written in another language as a requirement (as opposed to option) is sure to turn off a lot of users (though I personally could use it).

To be clear, does this still not work with 3.1? Any status updates?

The search works now (without the full text search module) on the forum holder out of the box. while there is the search bar included in the forum template, too, it doesn't seem to work. i am currently researching this issue and it seems the allowed action and search function is not implemented in the controller.