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. :-)