Course search

Introduction

"Advance course search" is a plugin that makes course search more flexible, fast , case-insensitive and can sort results by relevance. The plugin also have the capability to search into course attachments(course overview files and summary files). Its gives more powerful way of searching into courses via features like results caching, Sorting with different aspects, spelling correction(Did you mean?) feature, fuzzy search (alternate form of words).

Installation

To enable searching with "Advance course search plugin" you need to install both admin tool, search_cleantheme. enabling cleantheme will take control over your moodle course search.

Setting up Advance course search is quite easy ! you just need to go thorough these steps.

Installing Admin tool

Download the admin tool from here (https://github.com/shashirepo/moodle-tool_coursesearch) Extract the Course Search folder. and put it under moodle installation /admin/tool directory. If you are already logged in just refreshing the browser should trigger your moodle site to begin the install 'Plugins Check'. If not then navigate to Administration > Notifications.

Installing search_cleantheme

Download the cleantheme from here (https://github.com/shashirepo/moodle-theme_cleantheme) Extract the theme folder. and put it under moodle installation theme directory. If you are already logged in just refreshing the browser should trigger your Moodle site to begin the install 'Plugins Check'. If not then navigate to Administration > Notifications.

Installing Solr & placing the plugin Schema

Download the latest Solr 4.4.0 release from: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Unpack the tarball somewhere not visible to the web (not in your apache docroot and not inside of your moodle directory).

The Solr download comes with an example application that you can use for testing, development, and even for smaller production sites. This application is found at apache-solr-4.4.0/example.

Move apache-solr-4.4.0/example/solr/collection1/conf/schema.xml and rename it to something like schema.bak. Then move the schema.xml that comes with moodle course search admin tool plugin to take its place.

Similarly, move apache-solr-4.4.0/example/solr/collection1/conf/solrconfig.xml and rename it like solrconfig.bak. Then move the solrconfig.xml that comes with the moodle course search admin tool plugin to take its place.

Finally, move apache-solr-4.4.0/example/solr/collection1/conf/protwords.txt and rename it like protwords.bak. Then move the protwords.txt that comes with the moodle course search admin tool plugin to take its place.

Make sure that the conf directory includes the following files - the Solr core may not load if you don't have at least an empty file present:

solrconfig.xml schema.xml elevate.xml mapping-ISOLatin1Accent.txt protwords.txt stopwords.txt synonyms.txt

Now start the solr application by opening a shell, changing directory to apache-solr-4.4.0/example, and executing the command java -jar start.jar

Features

• Non Latin support with search queries.

• Search results with relevance(Score)

• Searchable Document Formats

 * HyperText Markup Language
 * XML and derived formats
 * Microsoft Office document formats
 * OpenDocument Format
 * Portable Document Format 
 * Rich Text Format
 * Compression and packaging formats [See Rebuilding Solr Cell]
 * Text formats

• Indexing to make course search fast and efficient

• Sorting by relevance

  *  spelling correction (Did you mean?) feature.
  *  fuzzy search (alternate form of words).
  *  Sorting results by score, by shortname, by startdate

• Work consistently on different database engines and different content language.

How it works ?

TODO

How to report a bug

Please, use Tracker[1]

Credits

• Mentors: Marina Glancy & Michael de Raadt

See also

• Moodle GSoC projects for 2013
• Moodle GSoC Overview page
• GSOC Proposal
• Original idea