NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

Mitch Pirtle wrote:
> I'd love to see some sort of joomla<->sphinx integration, that one
> might be worth creating a project for on JoomlaCode. To be honest
> though I'm not sure how you would integrate the two, as they are quite
> separate and distinct beasts ;-) 
Well, I've been fixing some code that does searches of data in a Joomla 
component(AdsManager), which also comes with a really messy mambot to 
plug into the regular Joomla search.  The default searches are really 
really bad(price fields can be searched for EXACT price, not ranges).

So I started looking at how to make that advanced search mode a bit more 
friendly, when I ran across Sphinx and looking at it, it has every 
advanced search function I would want.  Since all you need from your 
search result is an id number and the component it is in, it seems to me 
Sphinx could be easily integrated with a server side search, so the 
server checks the Sphinx system based on the parms, and returns a bunch 
of data, than back to the Joomla MVC component to format the display of 
the data.

I have a good idea of how to integrate my component with Sphinx.  And I 
see how to do the Joomla content component.  The big problem I was 
looking at was how to make it painless to integrate everything else?  
Something that would take all the search Plugins installed for each 
component, and build out the Sphinx index(though worst case, I think 
that can be handled just by saying "hey, here is a neat tool if you want 
to write yet ANOTHER search module")

The only downside I saw with it was requiring a server to run the daemon 
on(yeah, I'm a shared hosting guy.  I just don't have the time to deal 
with the hassle of setting up, configuring, and securing a server these 
days.  Other than periodic refreshes on my MythTV/router I don't worry 
about it much.)

Still, it would be a fun project to work on, providing I can find 
someone who wants to handle the headache of maintaining a linux server. :-)