New Kino Search Extensions Released For Foswiki

Tonight I have released the new and improved Kino Search extensions for Foswiki.

Kino Search is a Perl port of the Lucene indexed based search engine from Apache. It provides a very fast full text search across large amounts of data, plus the ability to use Google style operators.

The Foswiki implementation is made up of the KinoSearchContrib and the KinoSearchPlugin. Not only does this provide indexed search for topics, it also has the ability to index a number of attachments, including MS Office 2003 and 2007 documents and PDF's.

The KinoSearchContrib is the workhorse, providing the indexer and a script for the searching. The KinoSearchPlugin is a thin wrapper around it that hooks into Foswiki to provide a %KINOSEARCH% macro and support for indexing on immediately when a topic has been saved.

There are a number of improvements over the previous version of Kino Search for Foswiki, including:

• Fast CGI and mod_perl support
• Indexing MS Office 2007 files
• Much more resilient indexing
  • In particular when indexing password protected files or when an incorrect file type is supplied (such as attaching a image and calling it myfile.txt)
• Using more of the official Foswiki API
• Improved documentation and templates

If your Foswiki install has grown to a size where the performance of the default search is starting to suffer then you will need this extension. Of course smaller wikis will also benefit from the attachment search.