Create an Advanced Search Controller

[wilr]

From http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/4869

An ideal Advanced Search Form for the Forums

The current search is fairly limited. We should have a advanced search controller to handle more advanced searches.

• Search term proximity to each other, not just "do they exist somewhere".
• Enable syntax to make one term more relevant than others.
• Target one or many specific sub-forums
• Ability to view all posts by a specified user (#5272)
• Allow date of posting as a criteria (#4986)

[DryerLintPurple]

Frankly, 'relevance' algorithms not made by Google are almost universally awful. I'd say forget that idea and just default to most recent first. If you want to put in some sorting options, maybe created time, updated time, thread post count, thread view count, alpha by author, and alpha by thread name. If you want to provide an option to use the relevance sort provided by mySQL fulltext search or Solr or something, alright, whatever, but don't bother trying to write your own. I'd definitely stick to thread last post time as the default sort, though.

Other common forum search features:

• Standard search term modifiers: booleans, wildcards (or a good stemming algo), and exact phrases (and of course, defaulting to boolean OR instead of AND is probably even worse than most relevance algorithms)
• Select whether to search thread title, text, or both
• Select whether to return results as a list of threads that match the terms, or display the individual matching posts with direct links to those posts (I'd default to the latter)
• The last 3 bullets in the OP's list