Finder 2.0 Beta2 Released

The JXtended team is proud to announce the availability of Finder 2.0 Beta2, the newest release of our Advanced Search system for Joomla 1.5.

Finder is a powerful search engine that gives you access to technology used by major search engines like Google™ and Yahoo!™. Finder 2.0 features a completely redesigned core engine for better search results, AJAX powered search suggestions based on the actual content of your site, an expanding selection of search plugins, and much more.

About the Beta2 Release

Finder 2.0 Beta2 was released to address several serious bugs with the Beta1 release and to share the three new Finder plugins for Joomla Categories, Joomla Sections, and Kunena Forum Posts.

Help perfect the most advanced search system available for Joomla by testing it against your Web sites and let us know if you run across problems. The more exotic the content the better, the more content the better. We are really excited about Finder 2.0 and the possibilities it opens up for the future of Joomla and the Web.

As with any Beta release, Finder 2.0 is not yet ready for production Web sites. While we are happy with the stability and security of the system in its current form, it has not been as thoroughly tested and audited as our stable releases. For this reason we strongly suggest that you do not use the Beta in a production environment.

Package Contents

The Finder 2.0 Beta2 package includes the core search system, a search module, as well as an administrator “status” module. The Beta2 release package includes search plugins for Joomla Articles, Categories, Contacts, Sections, and Web links; JXtended Catalog; JXtended Labels; JXtended Magazine Articles, Authors, Issues, and Publications.

Also available as optional downloads are plugins for DOCman by Joomlatools; EventList events and venues; documents found on the filesystem; K2 by JoomlaWorks; VirtueMart; Kunena; and Zoo by YOOtheme™. In addition to those, we have also made plugins available to add support for indexing Microsoft Word™ DOC and DOCX files as well as Adobe™ PDF files. To see the full list of search plugins available for Finder in addition to what comes in the main package, check out the Finder 2.0 Beta2 downloads page.

Installation Notes

Unlike most JXtended extensions, Finder 2.0 cannot be installed over an older version. You must uninstall any old versions of Finder on your site before installing the new package. Read more about how to install Finder.

Requirements

Finder 2.0 is the first JXtended extension to use the new JXtended Libraries 2.0. The Libraries will come bundled with the Finder package so there is no need to download any extra packages unless you need support for non-standard extensions.

Finder 2.0 also requires:

• PHP 5.2 or higher.
• MySQL 4.1 or higher.
• Expanded indexing support for files will require safe mode to be off and the popen() function to be callable for PHP.
• Non-Latin based languages require UTF-8 properties support for PCRE.

We also have a small PHP script to check your Web server for compatibility with Finder 2.0. Just download the package, extract the PHP file and upload it to your Joomla 1.5 site. It needs to be placed in the same directory as your configuration.php file and then called via your favorite Web browser by navigating to the URL of your Joomla site followed by “requirements.php”. For example, “http://jxtended.com/requirements.php”.

Subscribe to Finder now to experience the future of search for Joomla 1.5.