Hi all, The existing search functionality on wordpress.org has been bugging me, and apparently other people as well, for quite a while, and I would like to work on helping to fix that - especially in helping to provide a specific Codex search functionality.
MediaWiki already has a decent search ability, which redirects to the found page if an exact match for the search term is found in a page title. Exposing this functionality would be an improvement over the current situation: eg. compare the results of " http://codex.wordpress.org/?search=posts"; vs " http://wordpress.org/search/posts";. In my opinion, just offering a "Codex search" box which used the MediaWiki search results, rather than the Google results that appear now, would be helpful for most users trying to navigate the Codex. The situation gets trickier, however, with the entries which are prefixed with Function_Reference/, Class_Reference/, etc. Look at the search results found, for example, for "http://codex.wordpress.org/?search=wp_remote_post";. Not so pretty... And its kind of hard to programmatically determine, for example whether a search term should be prefixed with "Function Reference", "Function API", or whatever else. Overall, this means that the Codex is not as useful to developers as it could be. When I'm working, for example, I depend on DuckDuckGo's bang syntax search often to quickly look up manual pages for functions, and the experience looking up WordPress functions is definitely subpar as compared to other environments. When I'm searching for PHP functions, like "!php array_merge", the experience is a quick zero-click lookup. It would be nice to have that same experience in the WP Codex, like if searching "!wp register_post_type" would bring me directly to the relevant Codex page. What is the solution to this? Does it make more sense to create redirect pages for every function name indexed in the codex, ie creating a page called "register_post_type" with the content "#REDIRECT [[Function_Reference/register_ post_type]]", or is there an extension that will make searching more user-friendly? I'd like to work on this, but I'm not sure what discussions and decisions have already happened. Can someone point me to a helpful way to contribute? Thanks in advance, Nathaniel Taintor, Designer/Developer *Golden Apples Design* http://goldenapplesdesign.com @GoldenApples | 717.434.3226 [email protected]
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