Search Architecture

[Eelke]

Yes, I believe Vanilla does this. In fact, I like more of the concepts behind Vanilla, like personal messages within the context of public threads ("Whispers"). I actually did a brief investigation whether I should move to Vanilla from phpBB (2, at that time). I didn't, because Vanilla is extremely barebones in other areas (well, that's why it's called "Vanilla", I suppose) and it would at best take a lot of searching for and testing of required extensions and at worst a lot of coding to get in many essential features my users were used to from phpBB. I suppose we can take inspiration from other projects, though, right?

[naderman]

We already have global announcements. Maybe one should generalise this so that any kind of topic can be in an arbitrary number of forums.

[ToonArmy]

We already have global announcements. Maybe one should generalise this so that any kind of topic can be in an arbitrary number of forums.

It'd cure the global announcements headache.

[Dog Cow]

Cross-posting is definitely one of the features which I miss when I go from Usenet to web forums.

[bobtheman]

Yes, I believe Vanilla does this. In fact, I like more of the concepts behind Vanilla, like personal messages within the context of public threads ("Whispers"). I actually did a brief investigation whether I should move to Vanilla from phpBB (2, at that time). I didn't, because Vanilla is extremely barebones in other areas (well, that's why it's called "Vanilla", I suppose) and it would at best take a lot of searching for and testing of required extensions and at worst a lot of coding to get in many essential features my users were used to from phpBB. I suppose we can take inspiration from other projects, though, right?

I hope phpbb4 doesn't take this route... theres a difference between avoiding bloat and being to simplistic. Then, as we are already seeing discussion on, we have arguments of what should be considered "CORE" and what should be left as a plugin and force users to rely on third party development. Though i do acknowledge the difference, and the importance of both.

[Eelke]

What route would that be, exactly? You mean a minimalistic out of the box product? I agree, I think I made clear that's one of the traits of Vanilla that I don't like I do like a minimalistic core, that comes with a bunch of "standard" modules pre-packaged, to make a complete product that roughly has the same funcitonalities phpBB has always had, but can easily be replaced and added to, when the need arises.

[naderman]

To come back to the topic of search itself: I think we should take a look at eZ Components' Search abstraction. It works on generic documents with types and supports useful backends. The number of available backends could certainly be extended if we wanted to use it.

[Dog Cow]

But that relies on Solr for backend. That's fine if we're aiming phpBB 4 at the type of person who runs his own operation and can compile and install software, but not for the masses who don't have their own box and can't install server-level daemons and such.

[naderman]

No it does not. Solr is one option, Zend Search Lucene (pure php) is another and as I already wrote one can add more. Either way this is about the interface not about the backends themselves.