Official Foswiki Weblog

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.

Andrew Jones extensions andrew jones, extensions, release, search

Did you ever ask yourself how one can improve the WebIndex in Foswiki, that simply lists the entries of a Foswiki-Web in alphabetical order? Andrew R. Jones created a Best Practice Tip on Foswiki.org and in his weblog (Improving the Web Index in Foswiki using the Filter Plugin):

In a standard Foswiki setup there is a topic in every web called WebTopicList, which is linked to from the side bar as Index. By default it simply lists all the topics in one big list, as shown below (or view onfoswiki.org):

This certainly isn’t very elegant. Luckily by using Michael Daum’s Filter Plugin we can improve the index by giving it some structure and making it more like a directory, as shown below:

To do this we only need to make a small change to the WebTopicList in the System web. Since all the other webs simply import that page the changes will be immediately visible across the wiki with just the one change.

Edit the WebTopicList topic and replace this line:

%TOPICLIST{"   * [[%BASEWEB%.$name][$name]]"}%

With this:

%MAKEINDEX{"%TOPICLIST{"$name" separator=","}%" cols="3" header="$anchors" format="[[%BASEWEB%.$item][$item]]"}%

Thats it! You now get a much more friendly and useful index in all of your webs.

Note: This tip has also been made available on foswiki.org.

mseibert tips ajones, andrew jones, best practice, development, features, foswiki, help, navigation, overview, webindex