Search
Introduction
Firefly.NET supports text indexing of resources as well as pages so that the Search facility now covers pages, resources and images. You can narrow down your search to the contents of individual sections also.
Search results are displayed using a Google-style summary with clickable links which take you to the page concerned.
Search techniques
Each Firefly.NET template has a Search box built in, its exact position varying from template to template. Locate the Search box, enter the keyword(s) (e.g. "insert") to be searched and press the Search button:
This brings up the Firefly.NET Search results window:-
Several references to "insert" are then displayed, including references where "insert" is part of a word, e.g. "inserted", although these are not shown in the screenshot. What the search routine is doing is to look at every word that the indexed text database contains and pick out every page that contains the word "index" anywhere on it. Those pages containing more than one reference are put at the top of the list. A short extract from the page containing the word "index" appears underneath too. You can then select the reference which looks to be the most relevant, click on it, and go to see the whole page.
Quick resources results
the box on the right of the Search window serves as a reminder that the search term might be relevant to resources as well as Firefly.NET pages as it displays the first 5 results from a parallel search on resources. In the example shown, there are only five such resources, one being an image containing the word "insert" in the file name, one being a Word document which contains the word "insert" somewhere in the text.
Refining your search
The main tool available to help refine the search is Search within, its pull-down menu being available at the top of the Search box. There is an additional option to search for resource type:
Search within: this allows you to search within a specific site (if there is more than one on the Firefly.NET installation) or within a specific section of a site. All searchable sections are listed in the pull-down menu - clicking will select the chosen site/section. Then click Search again to generate the refined list of results.
Resource Type: allows separate searching of Pages, Resources or Images. The default setting is Pages as shown above. Selecting Resources produces the full list of results contained within the Resources share whilst selecting Images produces thumbnails of all relevant images in the Resources share.
Quick Search
Instead of pressing the Search button to bring up the full Search page, a short wait will result in an inline display of a short list of the top search results, just below the Search box. Quick Search searches the entire site and returns page titles only and is thus good where the search term appears in the page title. Each result is hyperlinked to the relevant page.
An example is shown below:
