Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Requests for technical administration/Replacement of existing search extension

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Replacement of existing search extension[edit]

Figure 1
Figure 2
Title
Removal of Extension:TitleKey, installation of Extension:CirrusSearch and two further associated extensions
Type
Mediawiki extension
Reasons
  • Search autocompletion in multiple namespaces has been broken since March 2020. The currently used extension, TitleKey (which originally supported the ability to search in all namespaces to be case-insensitive), is incompatible with our current version of MW and the extension source has not been updated for MW 1.34 (currently our search autocompletion entries are limited to Mainspace only, with no option to receive prompts for namespaces useful to editors such as File and Template).
    • As an example, see Figure 1 on the right: The first few results from typing "Template:Armor" should appear below the search box per Special:PrefixIndex/Template:Armor, e.g. Template:Armor, however not a single result appears.
    • We suggest removing Extension:TitleKey since it is unsupported and important functionality is broken for MW 1.34+.
  • We then suggest installing mw:Extension:Elastica (backend), mw:Extension:CirrusSearch (normal search features) and mw:Extension:AdvancedSearch (enhanced search page with the various options clearly laid out).
    • The first two extensions will provide a better search service than the natively built in search module, and should address the autocompletion issue.
    • Currently our Special:Search only offers rough or exact (when you wrap the input in quotes) match searching. Finding a relevant result is often patchy as a result.
    • The third extension (see Figure 2 on the right) massively improves search functionality by adding a dropdown menu which allows you to specify a page by Category, page text content, title, not like title...
    • All three extensions are utilised by other large wikis such as Wikipedia, and as such their extensions will in all likelihood continue to be supported as MW continues to be upgraded to further versions (unlike Extension:TitleKey which was used by basically nobody and as a result there was no apparent attempt to update it when it broke).
Links
mw:Extension:Elastica, mw:Extension:CirrusSearch, mw:Extension:AdvancedSearch
Possible pitfalls
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