5.2. Searching for Content

Next: Performing an Advanced Search Previous: Adding Comments to Content  

Plone contains a powerful search engine system based on Zope's ZCatalog. This search engine allows content to be cataloged in multiple ways and to be queried efficiently and quickly. Chapter 10 covers the internals of how this works and how it can be queried.

When you're searching for content, the content will be shown to a user if it's one of the two states: published or visible. At the top of your Plone site a search box provides an easy way to do simple textual searches in the same way as a search engine (see Figure 3-28). For example, enter Tuesday to find all content that contains the word Tuesday. A result of all matching content will display; click the title to get to the content.

Figure 3-28. A search for Tuesday on Plone.org

The search provides a quite sophisticated search, with features similar to most search engines. You can make this simple query quite complex. For example, you can use the following options:

Globbing: You can use an asterisk to signify any letters. For example, entering Tues* matches Tuesday and Tuesdays. You can't use the asterisk at the beginning of a word, though.

Single wildcards: You can use a question mark anywhere to signify one letter. For example, entering ro?e matches rope, rote, role, and so on. You can't use the question mark at the beginning of a word, though.

And: You can use the word and to signify that both terms on either side of the and must exist. For example, entering Rome and Tuesday will return a result of when both those words are in the content.

Or: You can use the word or to signify that either terms can exist. For example, entering Rome or Tuesday will return a result of when either of those words are in the content.

Not: You can use the word not to return results where the word isn't present; a prefix of and is required. For example, entering welcome and not page would return matches for pages that contained welcome, but not page.

Phrases: Phrases are grouped with double quotes (' ”) and signify several words one after the other. For example, entering 'welcome page” matches This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content Management System, but not Welcome to the front page of my Web site.

Not phrase: You can specify a phrase with a minus (-) prefix. For example, entering welcome -'welcome page” matches all pages with welcome in them, but not ones that match the phrase welcome page.

NOTE All searches are case insensitive.

Large sites may have a lot of results, so only 20 results display at a time. To page through the results, navigation bars will appear at the top and the bottom of the search result pages. The values on an object used in a search are its title, description, and body text (if the content type has any—for example, news items and documents).

Next: Performing an Advanced Search Previous: Adding Comments to Content