SearchSummaryPluginDev Discussion: Page for developer collaboration, enhancement requests, patches and improved versions on SearchSummaryPlugin contributed by the TWikiCommunity.
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Feedback on SearchSummaryPlugin

-- CrawfordCurrie - 06 Jun 2007

Great enhancement. In the example I see broken off words, I assume you are counting a number of characters before and after each occurrence. It would be more natural to count words (as by spec in SummaryBasedOnSearchTerms).

-- ArthurClemens - 06 Jun 2007

Or, to have a more even distribution, count the number of chars and move to the next space up to a limit, as done my the internal search summary.

Thanks Crawford for contributing yet another neat plugin!

Feedback:

• Broken link for TWikiVariable (plural vs. singular)
• In TWiki docs, text user enters is usually shown in monospaced font (see TWikiDocsStyleGuide#Text_formatting_conventions)
• For SHORTDESCRIPTION, instead of "Improve the way search summaries are presented", I suggest to use something descriptive, such as "Highlight search term in search summary and show context around search term".
• How about measuring and documenting the PluginBenchmarks? See Plugin Info table in NewPluginTemplate:

  Benchmarks:

  GoodStyle nn%, FormattedSearch nn%, SearchSummaryPluginDev nn%

  (wondering why this was taken out of the template in the BuildContrib.)
• I tagged the plugin topic. Please help with tag votes.

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Jun 2007

My users have asked that the summary also contains a topic's breadcrumb. Could SearchSummaryPlugin be enhanced to do such a thing, or should I make a plugin that depends on SearchSummaryPlugin?

-- ArthurClemens - 06 Jun 2007

Once this feature gets into the core code I think we should add a $summary(searchcontext) to the existing $summary(...) tokens as documented in FormattedSearch. Along the same line, we could add a $summary(breadcrumb) token that can be used for example as $summary(searchcontext, breadcrumb). Since this plugin code is intended to be moved into the core code after 4.2 release I think the breadcrumb feature could be added to this plugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Jun 2007

Arthur, not sure what you mean by "contains the topic breadcrumb". You are dead right about the broken words.

As for all the other ideas; great feedback, thanks. The requirements have been driven by Escape Studios, and the implementation realises those requirements and no more. However I did the tricky bit - the monkey patch - and tuning the code to present the summary differently shouldn't be beyond any programmers abilities. That's why I left the modification policy as "PleaseFeelFreeToModify".

Peter, I believe I explained to you before that I don't include the PluginBenchmarks (see my remarks on that topic). Many thanks for the other feedbacks on the topic, though!

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Jun 2007

I would be sad if Escape Studios kind of dictated how summaries will look like. Perhaps a setting (NOOOOOOooooo) could be used?

Topic breadcrumb: the hierarchical list of parents up to the current topic. For instance:

Coding > Perl > CPAN > Sorting

-- ArthurClemens - 08 Jun 2007

They don't have to dictate; I just said I'm only coding to meet their requirements, and no further.

Arthur, if I understand you correctly, I don't think that's anything to do with the summary. It looks like it should be $breadcrumb or something similar.

Sven customised the templates to show the breadcrumbs in search results for Escape already. We used the BreadCrumbsPlugin. No code changes, IIRC.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Jun 2007

I like Arthur's idea of an unlinked breadcrumb in the summary, useful in RSS feeds etc. For this it should be $summary(breadcrumb). Best to track in a feature proposal topic in Codev.

-- PeterThoeny - 08 Jun 2007

I love this plugin. Personally I think it should be part of the core.

We have a problem which we hope to fix soon: after the pugin was working fine for several months on our evaluation site, it suddenly stopped showing the topic summaries and seems to show a mixture of whole topics (as in bookview) and just the first couple of lines of other topics, or even an apparently random selection of a topic in the results page. I assume we've done something which has messed this up (we're not very experienced). We've tried disabling all other plugins in case there is interference but this doesn't help.

We moved on to setting up a permanent site on another server and then the same thing happened again. I may not have described this very well. If and when we find a solution to this, I'll post it here.

-- TamsinTweddell - 11 Jan 2008