After some thought, I wanted to discuss the possibility to add a
search functionality along with revamping the UI as I'm confident of finishing the UI part earlier than the deadline. (if I don't meddle too much with some of the existing stuff)
I know a search overhaul is already planned as @hanakin pointed out, but I feel a local one is more intuitive to the user than using the global search at the top and would go well with the new UI. Would appreciate any thoughts on this.
If made from scratch, the basic algorithm I thought of after reading about a few simple mechanisms and the current phpbb header mechanism :
- Limit the query length to prevent possible slowdown/failure
- Each query is broken into an array of individual words
- Common words that do not contribute much to a search yet occur very frequently should be removed.
Example "in","it","a","the"
- Remaining words are looked-for in the DB tables.
phpbb_privmessages, Message_subject, message_text
- Give some sort of score to every field that matches, to sort results in order of importance.
However, if this seems impractical to finish as one combined project, I will submit it as a separate proposal.