In Seattle

Asides

New York was a blast, but now I’m all the way on the other side of the country in chilly Seattle. There are apparently quite a few conferences going on here this week so booking a hotel was a nightmare, the selection was very limited, but on the plus side I ended up on one of the top floors of the Sheraton and the view is great. Gnomedex looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun and have a ton of good information. We’re going to do a WordPress BoF or party or open source bar or something, so put your name on the list on this page. I didn’t get to meet a whole lot of people in NY because my schedule was so tight, so hopefully I can catch up in Seattle.

New WP.org Search

Open Source, Search, WordPress

At the last IRC meetup the WordPress community asked for better search that included both the forums and the Codex and was integrated with the look and feel of the rest of the site. When I did this before it was horribly slow and it involved several queries across several different programs and MySQL hosts to get the results from the wiki, the forums, the blog, and then splice them together somehow. Later we switched to a plain Google site-search but they didn’t like the HTML we used for the search form so we took it down. Well after the meeting I remembered Yahoo Developer Network which had some sort of API for their search with a much higher limit than Google’s.

I went to the site to see how much of a pain it would be so I could start properly procrastinating, but I was taken aback by how incredibly easy it was to get an application ID and start getting the results back as simple XML. I began hacking on it right then. It was about 5 minutes to set up a search form with URIs the way I wanted, 7 minutes to get the XML and parse it out, 5 minutes to write in some paging, and then about 20 minutes tweaking the search page to make it look a little better. The result is the new search.wordpress.org WordPress Search.

It still needs some more work. There seems to be a dupe problem, which is actually a problem with our site, not Yahoo Search. I’d like to tweak the results to highlight newer topics more, or at leats allow for a date-based weighting. Finally I think it would be nice to include some WP-related blogs like Blogging Pro and Weblog Tools Collection in the results. Most importantly we now have a clean URI structure and home for searches which is abstracted from any piece of software or particular service provider. Yahoo deserves major kudos for opening up their information in such a free way and making it so easy that it’s taken me longer to write this post than start using their API.