[wp-docs] dedicated Codex search function

[Nathaniel Taintor]

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
goldenapplesdesign at gmail.com
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