1) Clean up the text analyser: make it handle UTF-8 and all sorts of characters. The word splitter now does intelligent splitting into words and supports all Unicode characters. It has smart handling of acronyms, URLs, dates, ...
2) It now indexes the filtered output, which means it can take advantage of HTML tags. Meaningful tags (headers, strong, em, ...) are analysed and used to boost certain words scores. This has the side-effect of allowing the indexing of PHP nodes.
3) Link analyser for node links. The HTML analyser also checks for links. If they point to a node on the current site (handles path aliases) then the link's words are counted as part of the target node. This helps bring out commonly linked FAQs and answers to the top of the results.
4) Index comments along with the node. This means that the search can make a difference between a single node/comment about 'X' and a whole thread about 'X'. It also makes the search results much shorter and more relevant (before this patch, comments were even shown first).
5) We now keep track of total counts as well as a per item count for a word. This allows us to divide the word score by the total before adding up the scores for different words, and automatically makes noisewords have less influence than rare words. This dramatically improves the relevancy of multiword searches. This also makes the disadvantage of now using OR searching instead of AND searching less problematic.
6) Includes support for text preprocessors through a hook. This is required to index Chinese and Japanese, because these languages do not use spaces between words. An external utility can be used to split these into words through a simple wrapper module. Other uses could be spell checking (although it would have no UI).
7) Indexing is now regulated: only a certain amount of items will be indexed per cron run. This prevents PHP from running out of memory or timing out. This also makes the reindexing required for this patch automatic. I also added an index coverage estimate to the search admin screen.
8) Code cleanup! Moved all the search stuff from common.inc into search.module, rewired some hooks and simplified the functions used. The search form and results now also use valid XHTML and form_ functions. The search admin was moved from search/configure to admin/search for consistency.
9) Improved search output: we also show much more info per item: date, author, node type, amount of comments and a cool dynamic excerpt à la Google. The search form is now much more simpler and the help is only displayed as tips when no search results are found.
10) By moving all search logic to SQL, I was able to add a pager to the search results. This improves usability and performance dramatically.
Here's a new patch that unifies the node/52 and book/view/52 paths for nodes. It involves a small change to hook_view(), which is discussed first:
Currently hook_view() expects node modules to return a themed node. However, each module does this the same way; they modify $node as necessary, then call theme('node', $node) and return the result. We can refactor this so that the calling function node_view() calls theme('node') instead. By doing this, it becomes possible for hook_nodeapi('view') to be called after hook_view() where the node contents are filtered, and before theme('node') where the body is enclosed in other HTML. This way the book module can insert its navigation into the body right before the theming.
Advantages of this refactoring:
- I can use it for book.module to remove the extra viewing path.
- The function of hook_nodeapi('view') becomes more like hook_view(), as neither will expect a return value.
- We more closely follow the flow of other nodeapi calls, which usually directly follow their corresponding specific node type hooks (instead of preceding them).
- The attachment.module people could use it to append their attachments in a list after the node.
- Gabor could use it instead of his filter perversion for his "articles in a series" module.
- A little less code in each view hook.
- The content hook is no longer needed, so that means even less code.
Disadvantages:
- Any modules written to use nodeapi('view') could be affected (but these would all be post-4.4 modules).
- Implementations of hook_view() would need to be updated (but return values would be ignored, so most would work without updates anyway).
Now the patch takes advantage of this API shift to inject its navigation at the end of all book nodes, regardless of the viewing path. In fact, since the paths become identical, I've removed the book/view handler entirely. We should probably provide an .htaccess rewrite for this (one is still needed for node/view/nn anyway). At the same time, there is a check in book_block() that shows the block appropriately on these pages.
http://drupal.org/files/issues/error_messages_list.png (issue #9138).
drupal_set_message() has been changed to group message by type and a
helper function, theme_status_message(), is added to display the messages.
Chameleon and Xtemplate have been updated to use this new function.
- Updated CHANGELOG.txt.
administrators will be able to define a custom 403 page, just as they
can define 404 pages now.
This needs to be documented in the "Changes since / migrating to ..."
pages.
configurable! Menu items can be disabled, repositioned, added and
so on.
Upgrading to requires you to run update.php.
This functionality depricates some of the 'navigation modules' in the
contributions repository. Furthermore, modules can now 'suggest'
menu items and site adminstrators can choose to enable them. Modules
in the contributions repository should try to take advantage of this.
+ Added a 'created' field to the users table and renamed the 'timestamp'
fied to 'changed' (cfr. node table). Update.php will try to determine
a 'created' timestamp for existing users.
+ The profile module no longer uses serialized data but has its own set
of tables. Known existing profile data is migrated by these new tables.
TODO: migrate the birthday field.
+ The profile fields can be grouped, and within each group, profile fields
can be sorted using weights.
+ The profile pages can be themed.
+ The profiles can be browsed based on certain properties/settings.
+ Change the _user hook: (i) 'private_view' and 'public_view' are merged
into 'view' as there are no private fields and (ii) 'edit_form' has
been renamed to 'edit'.
+ Avatar handling has been refactored and is now part of the user module.
The users table has a dedicted 'picture' field.
+ Simplified the way themes should use display/visualize pictures or
avatars.
+ Made it possible for administrators to replace or delete avatars.
+ ...
I hope this make for a good base to build on collectively.
Dries Buytaert
Steven Wittens
