Thanks for working on this, Mitchell. Found a couple of bugs:
Click on a subforum such as ST 2.x Q&A. Click on the forum search and type in a term and hit enter. On the results page, click in the box and hit enter again. It will change your forums to add all the ones you had in the filter popup the last time it came up. The same is true if you click add/edit forums and click to dismiss the popup without changing anything.
Oh, and speaking of sorting - when can we expect this? That's one function the old search has that is still missing. You could sort the results by:
Title
Number of Replies
Number of Views
Thread Start Date
Last Posting Date
User Name
Forum
and choose Ascending/Descending
Of those sorts, Thread Start Date and Last Posting Date are the most important to me. As is sorting it by Descending order. The reason this is so important is because Sencha Touch changes so much over time. Often when trying to figure out something obscure, I'd find I would just have to go through every post mentioning certain key terms until I found one that was talking about what I needed. I obviously wanted to start with the most recent and work my way back because that's the one with the code most likely to be current.
The other sorts are sometimes useful to me, but on an order of magnitude less (and I don't think I've even used some of them like sort by title). So they'd be good to implement if it was only like five minutes or less for each one.
Likewise, there used to be a "Find Threads with at least: X replies" box. That was very handy for not finding lone voices of people asking the same question that was never answered.
Thanks for working on this, Mitchell. Found a couple of bugs:
Click on a subforum such as ST 2.x Q&A. Click on the forum search and type in a term and hit enter. On the results page, click in the box and hit enter again. It will change your forums to add all the ones you had in the filter popup the last time it came up. The same is true if you click add/edit forums and click to dismiss the popup without changing anything.
And about the sorting, we are working on getting something working on our dev box today. In fact it will be simple to allow multi-sorting and independent direction for each field. I will need to think of a good UI to handle multi sort but for the query params I hope to have something like
sort:foo sort:bar/ASC
or something like that. Not sure what the delimiter will be
Unfortunately, the list was only in my head and I ran out of buffer.
Well, there's still several things I've posted that haven't been fixed yet. So I assume you're including those as well as the sorting.
Some other things:
I can think of is you'll need a way to specify that you want only threads an author STARTED. You'd need this to replace the existing "Find latest started threads" search that's under profile.
Speaking of which, you could already replace the "Find latest posts" search under your profile with author:username. However, when I do that with the new search it says 65 results. When I do that for the existing "Find latest posts" link it says 120 results. Why the difference?
Also, I think the sub-forum search kind of messed up the top-level search. Now if you search at the very top level, you can't change your forums after you've clicked search. This is a little bit of a problem with the paradigm as I can't figure out when you could EVER add/edit forums like the link on the results pretends you can. Maybe I'll have to back-track and say I think searching within a sub-forum should replace your existing saved forums parameters...
Including "posts:" isn't required when you're searching the post body, right? I don't think it should be, since that's just not how most people are expecting search to work. Right now it doesn't seem to be required, but if you don't include "posts:" and click add/edit conditions, it doesn't understand which parts are posts: parameters. It'll even say "conditions: (none)", which is confusing. I've also ran into some other bugginess related to that.
When you click on the add/edit conditions after you've already got results up, it's not obvious what you should do to apply them. I think there should be an "Apply" button at the bottom that closes the box and applies them. It's still kind of weird that clicking the mask will just make the box go away, fill the new conditions in but then not do anything with the search results.
The way the terms and "add" button works in the box is weird. When you fill in the blank row with conditions, it should apply those conditions without pressing Add. Add should only be there to add ANOTHER blank condition row to fill out. It's the way most visual query builders work. For example, Thunderbird: SearchMessages_thumb.png
It's just a much more usable way to do it. No "woops, I forgot to click add after entering that word!"
You should be able to edit your old search terms in the popup. Right now you have to delete them and re-add them if you wanted to change from Include to Exclude or any of the other parts. This is probably low priority than anything else because while it's a pain you can get around it.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if having a visual query builder is even worth it. We're programmers here. I think if you just explain the query language right there in the box, we would do fine just typing them in.
Just keeping track of what I have worked on and what is still left on your list.
Worked on:
Also, I think the sub-forum search kind of messed up the top-level search. Now if you search at the very top level, you can't change your forums after you've clicked search. This is a little bit of a problem with the paradigm as I can't figure out when you could EVER add/edit forums like the link on the results pretends you can. Maybe I'll have to back-track and say I think searching within a sub-forum should replace your existing saved forums parameters...
When you click on the add/edit conditions after you've already got results up, it's not obvious what you should do to apply them. I think there should be an "Apply" button at the bottom that closes the box and applies them. It's still kind of weird that clicking the mask will just make the box go away, fill the new conditions in but then not do anything with the search results.
Still left to look at:
I can think of is you'll need a way to specify that you want only threads an author STARTED. You'd need this to replace the existing "Find latest started threads" search that's under profile.
Speaking of which, you could already replace the "Find latest posts" search under your profile with author:username. However, when I do that with the new search it says 65 results. When I do that for the existing "Find latest posts" link it says 120 results. Why the difference?
Including "posts:" isn't required when you're searching the post body, right? I don't think it should be, since that's just not how most people are expecting search to work. Right now it doesn't seem to be required, but if you don't include "posts:" and click add/edit conditions, it doesn't understand which parts are posts: parameters. It'll even say "conditions: (none)", which is confusing. I've also ran into some other bugginess related to that.
The way the terms and "add" button works in the box is weird. When you fill in the blank row with conditions, it should apply those conditions without pressing Add. Add should only be there to add ANOTHER blank condition row to fill out. It's the way most visual query builders work. For example, Thunderbird: Attachment 39738
It's just a much more usable way to do it. No "woops, I forgot to click add after entering that word!"
You should be able to edit your old search terms in the popup. Right now you have to delete them and re-add them if you wanted to change from Include to Exclude or any of the other parts. This is probably low priority than anything else because while it's a pain you can get around it.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if having a visual query builder is even worth it. We're programmers here. I think if you just explain the query language right there in the box, we would do fine just typing them in.
Including "posts:" isn't required when you're searching the post body, right? I don't think it should be, since that's just not how most people are expecting search to work. Right now it doesn't seem to be required, but if you don't include "posts:" and click add/edit conditions, it doesn't understand which parts are posts: parameters. It'll even say "conditions: (none)", which is confusing. I've also ran into some other bugginess related to that.
If you just search without any params:
'grid plugin'
means that both grid and plugin will be searched in the title and post body. Reason for this is by default it will give the best score, not everyone will be using conditions.
If you were to do this:
'grid posts:plugin'
means that grid will still be searched in the title and post body but plugin will only be matched in the post body.
Originally Posted by jep
Mitchell Simoens @SenchaMitch
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