Full-text search

[alsalin]

Based off of the Community Survey - we had several readers note that there's no easy way to search the website to find lessons. Is this possible? If so, is it hard? If not, what's the possibility of us implementing search capabilities?

On a related note - improving browsing and filtering. Some folks noted that it's not always easy to find things under specific filter headings.

[mdlincoln]

ahem I had a conversation with @ZoeLeBlanc at DH2018 this summer where she said she'd loooove to write a PR that would add full-text search to our site via lunr.js

[mdlincoln]

I think it'd be a great addition. There are solutions for doing it with a Jekyll site. My bandwidth would be pretty limited until after the launch of the French translations however.

[mdlincoln]

The one hiccup in implementing this would be that the index (a JSON file) is built via a plugin, which isn't supported by GitHub pages. HOWEVER, since our site builds over at Netlify as well, we might be able to point the javascript over to the netlify-generated&published JSON index even as people are still on the pages served by GitHub.

[drjwbaker]

(side note: thanks to @alsalin for opening all these issues!)

[ZoeLeBlanc]

Just saw this discussion, thanks for remembering @mdlincoln . I'm still interested in helping add a lunr search since I'm using a lot of tutorials in my teaching this semester. One question would be the layout of the search results, but maybe as a first step I could just get the lunr index generating and working with netlify. I could push a branch in the next few weeks if that's helpful, just let me know 😄

[mdlincoln]

@ZoeLeBlanc that would be quite cool! Both branch and PR builds will pop up over on https://ph-dev.netlify.com/ on the respective branch/pr subdomains that Netlify does a la https://deploy-preview-1028--ph-dev.netlify.com/ - I bet if you can get the plugin running, it could spit out json at least onto netlify's servers... and then we can go from there :)

[drjwbaker]

Re #1034, I'd say this is live but needs a development pathway to be outlined.

[ZoeLeBlanc]

I'll be working on this the next few weeks. Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts or ideas. Thanks!

[ZoeLeBlanc]

All finished 🎉