Recent updates, August 2011: Search and tagging

Submitted by admin on 18 August 2011 - 1:17pm

It's been a busy last couple of weeks, but we have finally implemented a long standing feature request. We have added a search capability to ProsePoint Express sites.

It's not just a simple nor basic search engine either. ProsePoint Express uses Apache Solr, a "popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform" which also powers many of the world's largest Internet sites.

Now you can use the same technology for your ProsePoint Expres site too!

Using search for your site

Newly created sites will have search already enabled.

For existing sites, you can utilise search by adding a search page.

  • Click on Content » Add content in the Control Menu.

If you wish to display a search box in a zone or on every page, you can also add a search widget.

  • View any page on your site and then click on Layout » Add a widget in the Control Menu.

Filter or sort search results by date

We'd like to ask our users whether it would be useful to be able to limit or sort search results by date. This is a feature we thought about adding, but postponed because we weren't sure if it would be beneficial.

Please drop us a message if you have any thoughts on this matter.

More Like This widget

One of the bonuses from Apache Solr is 'More Like This' search. This is a search which fetches results that are related to the current page. It is very useful for presenting contextual links to a visitor and entices them to read other related stories.

We've exposed this feature in a 'more like this' widget so now you can retain your visitors for longer!

To use this feature, you can add a 'more like this' widget.

  • View any page on your site and then click on Layout » Add a widget in the Control Menu.

Keywords, and possibly tagging

We have also added a Keywords field to stories. This allows you to attach one or more topic keywords to your articles.

Keywords are fed into the search engine and also into the Google News Sitemap. They can be used to tweak 'more like this' results. Stories which have common keywords will be likelier to appear in each other's 'more like this' search.

Keywords are an optional field. Since effort is required to fill in keywords for each story, if they are not convenient, they can be omitted and left blank.

Keywords are a form of tagging. At a later date, we may contemplate adding tagging-related features using the keywords data.

Architecture writeup

For those who are interested in some technical details, we have also completed a write up of the conceptual architecture of ProsePoint Express.

More to come ...

As before (and probably for a long time to come), we are continually adding new features and improving upon ProsePoint Express. If there is a new feature you need, or you can't think of how to achieve something with your site, please drop us a line and see if we have any ideas.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.