NOTE: This entry needs review and updating

The WebGUI Search System is a built-in solution best described by JT in his Dec 2007 blog entry.

Fun Facts about Search

1. Assets are indexed as they are added to WebGUI
2. The search index is stored in "assetIndex" table in the site database
3. Searching is performed via MySQL's full-text search ability.
   1. Stopwords - these words are ignored (MySQL and WebGUI each have their own set of stopwords; see _isStopword method in WebGUI::Search)
   2. Words shorter than four(4) characters are ignored
   3. More info about fine-tuning MySQL's full-text search capability
4. The following fields are indexed
   1. title
   2. description
   3. summary
5. File assets also have the uploaded file indexed if it is one of the following formats (identified by the file extension; see searchIndexerPlugins in configuration file):
   1. PDF
   2. DOC
   3. TXT
   4. HTML/HTM
   5. XLS
   6. RTF
   7. PPT
6. Search results can be limited to a section of your website and to specific asset classes.  That list is generated by looking at which assets your site uses.  If you want to limit the search to something which you haven't added to your site yet, add it first and then reconfigure the search asset.
7. A site can have multiple search assets.
8. If a search asset is modified to include/exclude asset classes, the site does not need to be reindexed.
9. The assetIndex table can be used in conjunction with SQL Reports to quickly and easily find the most recent approved versions of content. Depending on the nature of your query, it may be a cleaner and/or more efficient technique than use of SELECT MAX(assetData.revisionDate) subqueries.

Reindexing your website

Use the search.pl script located in WebGUI/sbin directory to reindex your website.

It is a good idea to reindex your website if you loose search functionality.  If you do a search and there are no results but you know that in fact there was a document on your website please reindex your site.  View the index.pl options by typing in "perldoc index.pl".

Search & Privileges (aka, Searching Protected Assets)

It appears that assets which the current user is not allowed to view will not appear in search results.

It is possible to have search results display these assets by subclassing WebGUI::Asset::Wobject::Search. Reason: Clients want to entice users to upgrade their account to access these resources.