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.