News Untold - Confessions of a developer

Search is a vital feature in a forum

If you're hosting a popular forum with an active group of users, it will quickly grow in size and it will end up being next to impossible to find older posts without using some sort of search feature.

You could use Google to index the forum (which it probably will anyway), and then integrate Google Search on you website, but that doesn't allow for custom searches in specific fields - that could be "posts by a particular author", or "topics posted between two given dates" etc. And even worst, Google Search of course isn't allowed to index the closed forums, so it will only index what is visible to the anonymous visitor.

To make a long story short, of course MVC Forum needs a search feature, and no way we have the time to implement our own search engine. So the next best thing, maybe even the best thing actually, is to find an open source search engine, that will easily (or at least without too much bother) integrate into MVC Forum.

So we have just released MVC Forum v0.6 last week (codename Alpha 2), and we're hard at work on the next release. The main new feature will be the integrated Lucene.Net search engine, and we'll of course add a bunch of other new feature too. And just to let you all know, after a productive evening, MVC Forum now includes a rudimentary, but working, search feature. At the moment you have the usual quick search feature, a small input box and button in the upper right corner that will search for matching keywords in all the forums you have access to. We have also put in a more advanced search, which allows you to select the forums you want to search. We will of course be putting more features into the advanced search feature, probably the options mentions above with posted dates, author, etc.

I guess that's all for now, take a look at MVC Forum on codeplex to see the work in progress!

Categories: MVC Forum - Lucene NET - Alpha 3