There is no search functionality available

[bvhme]

It's not possible to use any on-site search.

This is quite a difficult thing to tackle from both a build, design, and maintenance perspective. Perhaps we can think about some strategies.

What we probably want:

• search 1 site
• search all sites on *.publiccode.net
• full text and perhaps fuzzy search
• no very long build times as it slows contributing down

We can do this:

• In jekyll, with some kind of centralised information file
• In a separate server we build for this
• Using a 'search as a service' service like Algolia

[felixfaassen]

I've a very nice minimalistic solution which involves a index with a json which allows searching to be done client side without the need for external services: https://github.com/christian-fei/Simple-Jekyll-Search.

you can take look at https://github.com/publiccodenet/jekyll-theme-codebase-starter-kit how it is implemented.

[bvhme]

Commercial offers include:

• Algolia search (no cookies if you don't use their interface elements)
• Elasticsearch site search (I can't find information about no cookie use)

[ElenaFdR]

This is a dependent issue: publiccodenet/about#569

[bvhme]

Ideas from @felixfaassen and me from a small brainstorm:

• search site to search all properties including GitHub issues and pull requests: Idea: Dedicated search site #37
• you could add the search this repository to the footer: Search the source code files #39
• Adding guidance that if you can't find what you're looking for you can contact us: It's not obvious you can ask a human for help #38

[bvhme]

The expectation for search are incredibly high. If it doesn't work it will reflect very badly on us. However search is incredibly hard to do well especially with our open organizational structure since we don't have a clear line between users and staff, so things need a lot of editorialising.

[bvhme]

The reason we're not using DuckDuckGo or Startpage site search is because they use others' indexes and there is no way to request a new crawl meaning content is often weeks outdated.

[clausmullie]

Is there any reason we can't have a nice collapsing table of contents style menu like on the left here? https://dev.hel.fi/

[bvhme]

We used to support that, our https://smartcities.publiccode.net/ site still has some navigation. However it adds significantly more overhead on managing the pages, plus layout cross platform is very hard.

Regardless, this is not search but Navigation, #12

[clausmullie]

Yea I'm not well versed in this, but doesn't the hel.fi just index the pages, not navigation within pages? I like the idea of having an index of indexes you can always see and browse as a 'minimap', so you can orient yourself. Might also reduce the need for search. But I have no idea how this works, and can't help in making this.

[Ainali]

I would be happy with just a simple search on about, and about only. Fuzzy search is a nice to have, but not a blocker in my book.

[felixfaassen]

Boris and I had an interesting follow up conversations. Search is a solution to a specific problem.
It basically boils down to: who will need search and what kind of solutions to that problem do you have?

We think there are two use cases:

• Search needed for new visitors means "having a way for new visitors"
• Search needed for power users

For the new users we feel it is better to have our current pubbliccode website use the funnel there to guide people to our content in a natural way. Introducing search here will also remove context from the content. @boris added a basic Github Search to the template so people can search using Github.

For the about page it is important that users learn about the specific structure and taxonomy of the content. And we also want users to become contributors or at least invest into the inner structure of about and learn about how we are organized on GitHub. We value it more that people start using Github or clone the repo locally to search it than having a search online.

When discussing further we feel that everyone within the foundation should feel comfortable with git cloning, editing, branches git flow running things locally and that it would be very valuable to have a way to nudge people into our GitHub environment.

We think it would be very valuable to create a Workshop module which teaches people how to contribute through GitHub. The first goal to learn this ourselves but also to be a first step for people who are not comfortable with GitHub.

What we ultimately want is to get people involved with open source project to be a contributor inside the project, not contributing code only but proposing changes to governance, adding changing backlogs. If we help eg civil servants feel more confident about working on git and expressing their views and ideas there we a have a way of nudging people into the community and continue the work out in the open.

One Idea could be to redesign our last governance workshop for OpenZaak where we remove the option to add issues on stickies but actually learn them how to put them on GitHub. Think of it as a workshop which could stand on it's own or could be used as an addition to our existing workshops.

This will probably become feasible when we run this workshop again in the future. For now we would like to keep it as it is and not invest extra time in creating a search solution. We would still have a little time to discuss with the team on why we need search in the first place.

@bvhme please add anything you think is missing or unclear and close this issue.