Drupal offers a native search feature that is well integrated with structured content. This chapter will explain the search feature, walk through how to enable search on a site and outline configuration options. Drupal also offers more advanced search features and abilities to execute different types of searches. By design, there are common Drupal modules that extend search out of the box to address common use cases.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
Content management systems, especially those with a large amount of content, practically require that content to be searchable. Search engines such as Google have made search features ubiquitous, as users expect to find what they want and need as quickly as possible. Drupal is built to manage content and is capable of managing content at scale. As such, the search function is a widely used and popular feature that is built into the Drupal core and is highly extensible. Next, we explore how search capabilities are built into Drupal.
The search function is a specific feature built on top of existing content entities. Other systems introduce their entity types, but the functionality provided by the search function is only designed for the existing content-related entity types. This feature is provided by the Search module in Drupal core.
Implementing a search function requires an index for storage. At a high level, this can be considered a mapping...
The search settings can be found at admin/config/search/pages and are shown in the following figure:
Figure 12.4 – Out-of-the-box search configuration
The first section of Figure 12.4 highlights both the status of the index and the ability to re-index the entire Drupal application. Recall that Drupal leverages a queue to collect content changes and synchronize the index. This section demonstrates the state of the queue, which can help you understand if the index has all of the changes in Drupal or if CRON needs to process changes for the index to match Drupal’s content.
Important note
The indexing process can be very helpful in triaging issues with search. CRON runs periodically, and changes to content should not remain in the queue indefinitely. Having a large number of items to index can often be a sign of an issue. A safe starting point is checking Drupal’s logs for errors related to searches.
Figure...
Like most out-of-the-box Drupal features, search is designed to be extended. Several popular use cases can be addressed by contributed modules.
Facets (drupal.org/project/facets) is a project intended to offer site builders the ability to create additional search filters for end users who use search. Facets work well with Drupal’s structured content models. Consider a taxonomy field that categorizes nodes. Being able to filter by a term could be very useful beyond the out-of-the-box advanced search.
Facets go well beyond a term-based selection. Facets can natively change based on the type of field. This can be different form widgets or even different logic for searching fields. Ultimately, site builders can leverage this module to provide commonly used search interfaces tied to the underlying structured content.
Drupal offers out-of-the-box search capabilities, but other technologies might be better at allowing an application...
Search in Drupal helps both users and site builders create capabilities in applications to find content.
Drupal’s native search form, which invokes Drupal’s search processor, supports various search parameters. In the search form, the following can be entered:
"Wizard of Oz" OR "Gone with the wind"
And, don’t forget, Drupal does offer some advanced search options that can abstract Drupal’s native search form.
This use case is perfect for the Facets module. After enabling facets, which also enables Search API, facets can be created through Search API’s configuration (admin/config/search/search-api). Specific field-type widgets can be implemented through search API processors, specifically a preprocess query processor. Then, leveraging the advanced settings of the search page configuration, the processor can be added and the facets can...
This chapter highlighted both out-of-the-box and extended search features. Configuring search pages and the search form block allows site builders to build search functions into their applications without writing code. Concepts such as indexing were covered both within Drupal and by leveraging popular third-party indexes, such as Apache SOLR. Configuring advanced features, such as facets and autocomplete, can provide additional experiences that can be useful on a case-by-case basis.
The next chapter discusses contact forms in Drupal, which is a feature for user engagement. Contact forms provide a means for users to fill out a form on the Drupal application and reach administrators.
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