By Kanishk on Tuesday, 10 February 2015
Posted in Technical Issues
Replies 1
Likes 0
Views 681
Votes 0
I recently bought EasySocial, and I love the interface, but I'm having trouble with the search feature. I've spent all day trying to get it to work, and attempted different work-arounds, but nothing seems to work.

Site: http://54.159.221.216

Problem:
--------------
To recreate the situation, I set up a new site that was completely blank. Installed ES on it, and set up a new profile type named Programmer.

Next, I added a custom text box field to that type, verified that it was searchable, and named it Skills in the language-override section. Then I registered a new user named "billgates" under that profile type, and entered "DOS, BASIC, and x86 Assembly" under skills. So far so good. The problem is that I want to search by skills, and that's not working.

What I am looking for:
-------------------------------
In short, I want to search for "DOS" and have the user turn up in the results.


What I tried:
-------------------------------

I enabled the Joomla smart search plugin, indexed smart search, and added it as a module.
Result: If you search for DOS, you get nothing. If you start entering "bill", you get a hit. But when you click on it, it opens up the login module for some reason, and shows the user's stream. Odd.

Installed rokajax search and tried it.
Result: Neither DOS nor bill gets a hit.

Added EasySocial Search as a module.
Result: (Same as smart search.)

You can test this out on the URL for the site.

Summary:
--------------
If this situation is to be interpreted correctly, it appears that the EasySocial search module only allows you to search by user name. But really, this is not very useful. I mean, the whole idea of search is to search by different fields so you can connect with members based on certain attributes.

I guess you could click on "Advanced Search", select two different drop-down fields, and type in the search term, but nobody is going to go to all that trouble. People want to search quickly, and this is a crucial feature.

Notes:
-----------
I replicated this situation with JomSocial, and noticed that rokajax search works when you type in "DOS", or even partial phrases. But I like ES way more than JomSocial. If only searches could be performed on fields other than the user's name, it would be great.

Is there a way around this? I am willing to spend some time on this and change some code if it's necessary.

I appreciate any suggestions.
Hello Kanishk,

Thanks for the clear explanation. However, it is not possible to include the custom fields in the normal Search. This is because that normal search is a com_finder which is the behavior is the same as Joomla search. But the advance search is Easysocial feature. We added additional feature to let you search thru the custom fields.
·
Tuesday, 10 February 2015 20:38
·
0 Likes
·
0 Votes
·
0 Comments
·
View Full Post