Searching Joomla Sites - Walking through JXtended Finder

The standard Joomla site search is generally adequate for small sites, but does not scale well as the content of the site increases in volume. JXtended Finder has been produced to solve this problem. A common complaint is that the total number of matches is not made available. This means that for the same phrase, a competitor's site may show more matches than your Joomla site and this could influence their opinion of your credibility (and that's a big deal if you are selling something). Aside from that, most web-savvy users are familiar with how Google has set the standard for search results.

Finder has been developed to marry the Google-esque search model within the confines of the content provided on a Joomla web site.

Before we start, we need to clear up what Finder isn't. While the Joomla search will look for any occurrence of the target string, Finder's searching works on keywords. This means that if you have an article about dinosaurs, the standard Joomla search will return a match when searching for "saur" whereas Finder will only return results if you search for "dinosaur". However, Finder is able to detect phonetic misspelling and provide suggestions. The difference though, is speed. Finder is able to find the information far more quickly that the Joomla search.

Installation

Once you've purchase a subscription to Finder, and downloaded the extension (don't forget you also need to install the JXtended Libraries as well), you can install it in the normal way.

You can see that the package came with all the required extensions: the component, a modules and a number of plugins - it all happens in one convenient operation. Next, I'll select Components -> Finder from the Menubar.

Configuration

It's always a good idea to take a look at the Options (some other components call this Configuration, Preferences or Parameters) before you start launching into things. Click the Options button in the Toolbar. A popup window will display.

This screen is in two parts. On the first tab we have options that relate to how the results display. We can optionally display similar word suggestions (if no results are found but a similar word was found in the index), whether to display a relevance score, a short teaser for the result and so on. Because Finder indexes related information about content (such as the category an article is in) there are advanced search options available to filter by the information. You can optionally display an advanced search form.

The second tab allows you to configure how Finder actually indexes it's content. The main options here are the weightings that you can give to where the keyword is found. For example, if a keyword is found in a title you can weight it more heavily than if it's just found in the body text. The weights can be tuned to favor the results you think will be most relevant to your visitors.

Save the options once you are happy with your initial settings. You can always come back and change them again later.

Indexing Content for the First Time

The secret to the speed and efficiency by which Finder can return search matches is the fact that it pre-indexes all the words in your content. When you first install Finder you will need to run the indexer because it will have no data to search on.

Click Index in the Toolbar.

A window will open showing you how the indexing process is progressing. For a small site this will only take a few seconds. For a site with many thousands of articles, this could take a while. Don't close this window until you are told you can otherwise it will stop the indexing process.

When you close the progress window the page will refresh and you will be able to see all of the content the Finder has found (depending on the Plugins installed).

Setting up Finder on the Frontend

It's always a good idea to have the search page attached to a menu item. If you already do, then you just need to edit the menu item and change the type. If you need to create one, select the menu you want to add the search item to from the Administrator Menu and then click New in the Toolbar.

Finder only has one view so we select that from the list. Click on the Search link.

The Finder menu item has the ability to override many of the default options if you want to. It can also specify a Search Filter which we will look at soon.

Next we want to add or replace the existing search module with the Finder module. Bring up the Module Manager, click New in the Toolbar and select the module named 'Finder'.

The module has the basic abilities to allow you to display the advanced search form, or use a Search Filter.

The advanced parameters allows you to specify the visual elements of the search box, it's label and it's button.

Once this all configured, we can try out the new Finder search on the frontend. We've done this on the The Art of Joomla site. The old search results looked like the following screenshot:

Our new Finder search results looks like the following:

Overall the results list is more clean than the native search. You will notice the relevance scores under the teaser description. If you have JXtended Labels installed, the labels associated with the article will also be displayed.

Clicking on the Advanced Search link slides open the Advanced Search options. We can select a number of options to restrict our results. While the native Joomla search has some ability to refine searches, in Finder you can select just one category if you want.

Looking at Taxonomy

Finder allows you to look at the extra information it stores once it has run the indexing process. We call this taxonomy and Finder breaks it into two levels.

The top level is called the Branches. Branches are created by the plugins that Finder uses to index content. For example, the Joomla Articles plugin will create a branch for the Sections and Categories; JXtended Magazine will create branches for it's author and magainze issues, and so on. One of the important things to note is that for a branch like Category, we consolidate the information from all of the content. That is, we make no distinction as to whether the category is from a Joomla article, from DocMan, from EventList, or any other extension. This makes it easier for the visitor to find information because they don't have to know which extension your content is stored under. You can optionally unpublished any branch if you do not want it to display in the Advanced Search form.

If we drill into the Category branch, we can see all of the categories that have been mapped as well as the number of items that are mapped to the category.

You can optionally unpublish any mapped category if you do not want it to display in the Advanced Search list.

Search Filters

Search filters are where things start to get really interesting. Since we store the extra content information in the Finder taxonomy system, we can actually create preset filters to only search under specific conditions. To do this, we select Search Filters from the Linkbar and then New from the Toolbar.

We can give the filter a descriptive title and this will show in either the menu item or module. In this example, we will create a filter to only search articles in the Art of Joomla Developer Reference. So we click on Search by Section and a list of the available sections is dynamically added to the right. We can then select the Reference section to restrict the results.

Just by way of example, if we wanted to restrict on a category as well, we could click the Search by Category checkbox in the first list.

You can see that a new list has been dynamically added and from there you can select further filtering options. Once saved, the filter will appear in the list and from there you can edit it at a later date.

Filters can be used in a variety of ways. For example, Toowoomba Regional Council uses JXtended Catalog for their Events Register.

You can see some of the child menu items refer to particular locations. Each of these menu items have a corresponding filter that fixes the result set to a particular locality as defined by one of the custom fields in Catalog.

Search Plugins

Finder comes with a number of built in plugins as follows:

• Joomla articles
• Joomla contacts
• Joomla web links
• DocMan documents and PDF's
• JXtended Catalog
• JXtended Labels
• JXtended Magazine articles, authors, issues and publications
• EventList events and venues

Conclusion

The purpose of this walk through was to show you the capabilities of Finder as compared to the native Joomla search. The native Joomla search is adequate where the total content of your site is less than about 50 items in total (the natural limit of the native search results). Beyond that, the native Joomla search scales neither acurately nor efficiently. Large sites need to rely on a system such as Finder that pre-indexes content for efficient, accurate and fast results.