BuddyPress Global Search

[Chris van Donkelaar]

Hello TJ—

I was so excited to see your release of the Global Search plugin! I’ve played with it a bit, and the results look like something I think my site’s members will really appreciate.

But, I’m having an issue … It seems that the search results are missing a whole lot of relevant data. Active users are only seeing 20 or so activity results listed (and a lot of that is almost a year old). I’ve selected all the options in the plugin’s settings, but I can see anything else to tweak. I’m wondering if there’s anything I need to do on my site to help it look at all the data?

Thanks,
—Chris

[Alyssa]

@cvandonk are you by chance using BP Activity Plus or another media inserting plugin?

[Chris van Donkelaar]

@tjchester—We are moving towards using rtMedia (and it was active). I’ve deactivated it, but the search results are still only very old entries … Any other thoughts?

[Alyssa]

@cvandonk if all of your activity entries were made when rtmedia was active then there is a change rtmedia was using its own post-type which may prevent results from appearing since the plugin isn’t looking for custom post types. Something we should probably look into adding support for. I’ll send a request to our devs.

[Chris van Donkelaar]

@tjchester—

I think that having the search include custom post-types would be great!

But, rtMedia is new for us, so it hasn’t been active while this activity was happening. I’m attaching two screen shots to demonstrate … The first shows what’s reported from the user’s activity, the second is the search results. You’ll notice that the first activity result is from 3 days ago, the first search result from 11 months.

Am I misunderstanding something?

[Alyssa]

@cvandonk what was the search term…can you send me a link to the site, or PM me if it’s private?

[Chris van Donkelaar]

@tjchester—The search term was “Justin”, which I then compared between the search result and the activity page … I’ve sent you a login and password for the site by PM. Thanks!

[Alyssa]

@cvandonk after further review I found the plugin is functioning properly. When the plugin searches activity it only search for the key term you are searching for, not the actual username or person name. For that there are member results to search though that particular member activity manually. (doesn’t make sense to search for a user’s activity through the search, search for the user then go direct to their activity stream) Otherwise when you search a person’s name all of their posts will come up and not just ones where they were mentioned. We think this would be a poor user experience. So I hope this helps explain how the plugin works. Please let me know if there is still any confusion.

[Chris van Donkelaar]

Thanks for the clarification, @tjchester! I’ll review the results with this in mind …

[Brian]

Does BP Activity Plus also create a conflict with activity reporting? I have a site that has users in private and hidden groups and using that plugin, and we can’t find a lot of activity when we search through the dashboard or go to user Walls.

[Alyssa]

@teamduce I’m not sure we yet integrated hidden/private groups into the search feature.

[Anonymous]

@teamduce @tjchester

Hidden groups are included now (will be in next release).

Logic:
• For guest users – exclude all hidden groups.
• For members – include only those hidden groups where current user is a member.
• For admins – include all hidden groups always.