Websites York - Template47

Design Notes

From the write up on the Stacks4Stacks product page:

'Indexer is a smart search stack, which solves the common problem of offering a site-wide search capability of webpages in RapidWeaver. Indexer works by taking your website sitemap.xml file and spidering each of the pages listed. It extracts the page title, meta keywords and meta descriptions, and builds its own database comprising of this content. When a user navigates to search page built with Indexer, they are presented with a 'live' search box that quickly returns webpage search results.'

Here are the instructions from the same page:

'Follow these instructions for using the demo or full versions of Indexer in your RapidWeaver website:

• Add a new Stacks page type to your website (if you don't have one already) and make this your new, dedicated, search page.
• Give the page a suitable name and link, in the page settings.
• Open the Stacks Library and search for Indexer. Drag and drop a copy into your webpage.
• Remaining in edit mode and with the Stacks side panel open, access your Indexer settings. Choose your sitemap source from the options menu.
• Preview your webpage or publish your new webpage, to your web server.
• Press and hold the search box with your mouse, to reveal the 'Admin Console'.
• Follow the written instructions for building your search index. You would follow this same procedure for rebuilding the search index each time you add new pages to your website or need to update the search database.
• Returning to RapidWeaver again, you will find many other style and behavioural settings you are welcome to change.
• All settings have little informational tooltips, to explain what they do. All the button options and instructions can be translated into other languages.'

My Initial thoughts

To start with I was getting a message saying something about having to rebuild the search database from the Admin console. This is unique to this stack so not to be confused with any Total CMS Admin pages. Once I had done that and refreshed the page the message went away.

I assume at that point that whatever files this stack needs to operate had been created by reading the sitemap and gathering the relevant title and meta data from each page.

Then entering search terms such as 'Planning', 'Optimisation' and 'Freelance' started to work and show the title, the meta description and a link to the relevant page.

This stack obviously does not search the whole page's content so it depends on having its search terms appearing in the title or meta description.

Pros

• Simple to set up once you understand the process. (I didn't change any settings in the stack itself).
• Quick to run

Cons

• Limited to just the meta data content for searching
• Each time a new page is added to the site the process of re-building the search database needs to be gone through again. It could be very easy to forget this feature I feel.