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,

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!

>>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?

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.

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?

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,

Hi Nigel

CMS Builder does AND searching. You are correct.

Thanks, Ross.