Search options

[mkgold]

An educational institution considering CBOX for a project asked me about CBOX's search capabilities. Is child theming needed in order to add, say, a google search box to the homepage of the site? If so, what other options are available?

[boonebgorges]

A google search box can be added in any way that HTML can be added to a page. How that's done depends on where in the theme you want to add it. If the area supports widgets (as most of the homepage template does), then you can just create a text widget with the relevant HTML. Otherwise, you could create a child theme that puts the markup right into the template.

On 01/21/13 07:10, mkgold wrote:

An educational institution considering CBOX for a project asked me about CBOX's search capabilities. Is child theming needed in order to add, say, a google search box to the homepage of the site? If so, what other options are available?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/57.

[mkgold]

Okay, thanks. But I think we should make this part of the CBOX theme, or at least create a child theme that has this feature.

[r-a-y]

We have a running ticket for creating a CBOX child theme here: cuny-academic-commons/cbox-theme/issues/96

Note: this would only take effect for new installs.

For existing installs, we should probably put up some documentation on cbox.org detailing how to create a CBOX child theme.

[mkgold]

Thanks, Ray -- great ideas.

[boonebgorges]

Child themes are for end-users who want relatively future-proof ways to customize the look of their sites. For the most part, I'm not a huge fan of creating child themes for distribution. If a feature is important enough, it should just be included in the main theme.

Support for Google Custom Search is really best done by pasting HTML into a widget, which requires no theme-level support at all. If we need to do something more than that, it strikes me to be much more of a plugin issue, and there are lots of plugins that do it: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-custom-search/ for example. However, pushing a Google service as part of Commons In A Box seems to be in some conflict with our driving principle of moving people away from proprietary platforms.

IMO the best path forward is to create documentation for this and call it good enough.

[mkgold]

Agree that we don't want to push Google Search, but I do think that search is a pressing issue. Boone, where would/could the search box go easily on the homepage through a widget? It seems like there isn't enough room next to the slider, which would mean it would have to be on top of one of three parallel vertical content columns, thus disrupting the synergy of the page. Where are you imagining that it would go?

Just to be clear, I don't care what kind of search we include as long as it is effective, though I agree we don't want to push proprietary services..

[boonebgorges]

Where are you imagining that it would go?

I have no opinion on where it should go.

That said, I think that WP's default search is crummy enough, especially in the context of BP, that it's not a great idea to hardcode it into the header.

On 01/22/13 15:04, mkgold wrote:

Agree that we don't want to push Google Search, but I do think that search is a pressing issue. Boone, where would/could the search box go easily on the homepage through a widget? It seems like there isn't enough room next to the slider, which would mean it would have to be on top of one of three parallel vertical content columns, thus disrupting the synergy of the page. Where are you imagining that it would go?

Just to be clear, I don't care what kind of search we include as long as it is effective, though I agree we don't want to push proprietary services..

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/57#issuecomment-12563411.

[mkgold]

Is google the only option? Could something like duckduckgo be used to create a search box?

[boonebgorges]

The CUNY Academic Commons has more than a simple Google search box. It's a Google Custom Search, which filters by domain, and also returns results in a custom, embeddable format: https://www.google.com/cse/ I don't know of another search engine that offers a similar service. Even if there were similar alternative services, they would be similarly offensive, in that we'd be encouraging users to pipe their data through a third-party service.

I agree that search is important, but given the technical and ethical complexity of this issue, I think we'd best serve the users by creating good documentation than by bundling a questionable default solution. Documentation should describe: (a) the limitations of WP's default search; (b) how to set up alternatives like Google CSE (and what that means in terms of indexing); (c) more sophisticated solutions like Solr and other search software, along with pointers to pre-existing bridge plugins for WP

On 01/22/13 15:37, mkgold wrote:

Is google the only option? Could something like duckduckgo be used to create a search box?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/57#issuecomment-12564997.

[mkgold]

yes, I know that we have more than a simple google search box! But, yes, you make a convincing case. Can you please set up the documentation request for Scott?