Request for Moodle Doc page
Would somebody who know how this works, please add a page to Moodle Docs called Global search block and give a description of how it works. It is now on 1.8.2 demo.moodle so it looks like it is part of the standard Moodle? Thanks for all your effort. --Chris collman 06:55, 24 October 2007 (CDT)
General comments
This looks like a very cool project, just what Moodle needs. Will this be building on top of Zend's Zend_Search_Lucene? They appear to have amended the licence to prevent incompatibilities with the the GPL, so just the fact that it's PHP5-only is a major stumbling block. I'm not sure how that fits into the wider debate about what versions of underlying software Moodle requires/supports but personally I think Lucene-compatibility is very worthwile goal for many reasons.
Lucene could be interesting if it can compatible be GPL. It would be OK to make global search only work in Moodle when Moodle was running PHP5 (as "extra functionality"), as long as the interface disappeared quietly from view when Moodle was on PHP4. I think by the time this is finished that PHP5 will be fairly common even on web hosts. Martin Dougiamas 17:29, 2 June 2006 (WST)
Zend Lucene is distributed under the New BSD license. The licensing FAQ is here. To elaborate on the matter, "Code licensed under the (new) BSD license can be relicensed under the GPL (is "GPL-compatible") without securing the consent of all original authors." Code licensed under the old 4-clause BSD license is not compatible with the GPL, so in the case of Lucene and Moodle, I don't see any problems (since Lucene is under the new BSD license). --Michael Champanis 07:13, 5 June 2006 (WST)
I strongly recommend Tim Bray's On Search if you haven't already read it, really good stuff. --David Scotson 20:57, 30 May 2006 (WST)
Oh, the Lucene Web Service and Solr are also interesting, though replacing the need for PHP5 with the need for a Tomcat install. --David Scotson 21:04, 30 May 2006 (WST)
OpenSearch
Has any thought been give to providing an OpenSearch interface to this?
For those new to the concept OpenSearch is a special kind of RSS or Atom feed which contains pretty much what you'd return in a standard search interface, except XML rather than HTML. This allows neat things like:
- Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 will spot that you provide a search engine, tell the user and with a click of the mouse a Moodle-site specific search will be added to the browser where currently Google/MSN/Amazon or whoever-specific searches are available.
- instead of spidering your content, OpenSearch savvy search-engines (like Amazon's A9.com will just delegate the task to you, so you can have control over what you think is important and should be returned in searches
- various tools that let you easily do smart search things e.g.
- the current Multiple search block currently requires you to hand code a query as do many current browser implementations of the same functionality, it should be able to work out all that stuff for itself with OpenSearch-enabled sites.
- Mediawiki has an OpenSearch add-on so you could have your own search portal with e.g. Book searches from Amazon, alongside content from MoodleDocs and Moodle.org
There's some example PHP code here:
Cool, I'll have a look at this --Michael Champanis 07:33, 19 September 2006 (CDT)
