Smart Search

[enock]

Is it planned for VM2 to have a plugin to make it compatible with smart search?

[jenkinhill]

No Joomla components are currently compatible with Smartsearch. As it has just been made available in J2.5 it will take time to understand exactly how it will work and how to include support in components, but it is much more important is to get a stable VM2 platform that works in J2.5 than think about future possibilities.

[omd123]

Hi Jenkin,

Is the current status for Joomla smrt search and VirtueMart 2 still as in the previous post?

[franzpeter]

With VM 1.x.x I used that thing what is now called smart search with a plugin for virtuemart. For bigger shops I think it is not a very good solution. The indexing can take hours and while adding new products or categories (in a shop it could be for example daily) you need to reindex everything, taking a long time. It should be done after every product add or change, else the product is not found. It produces in that case a high server load, so the shop FE runs much slower during indexing.
So I think for an ecommerce component it is not the best solution, if the shop has a lot of categories and products.

[jenkinhill]

Google's custom search provides a way to add an extensive search facility to a site, although I have not used it on a VM site I have used it before on a couple of tourism sites.
http://www.google.com/cse/

[franzpeter]

@jenkinhill,

I completely agree with you. There is a nice explanation of the that http://docs.joomla.org/Smart_Search_Frequently_Asked_Questions. It says something about the speed improvement or not like:
What restrictions do I need to be aware of?

If you are changing content on your site frequently then you will need to run the indexer periodically to tidy-up the index. This is because deleting unused terms and phrases from the index is not currently handled automatically on-the-fly. This can be done manually from the Administrator or using the command-line indexer (which can be set up as a cron job to be run automatically).
Large sites may be better off with a dedicated standalone search engine, such as Solr, rather than the pure-PHP implementation used in Smart Search. In this first iteration of advanced search in Joomla it is likely that issues relating to scaling and performance will be revealed. There is also the potential for race conditions to occur when updating the index on frequent content changes. These issues are expected to be addressed more fully in Joomla 3.x.

[cas]

While it's an interesting discussion of the issues for those few big shops, for the majority of us with normal size shops, is there a VM plug-in for Joomla Smart Search? 

[cas]

Any update on when the VM Smart Search plug-in will be available? 

[cas]

Any update on when the VM Smart Search plug-in will be available?

[jenkinhill]

I guess it will be available when some developer decides there is enough demand for it. AFAIK the only non-Joomla core component Smart Search plugin available is for SobiPro. http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension-specific/sobipro-extensions/19827

The basics of developing such a plugin were covered in http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/issue-feb-2012/item/671-Developing-a-Smart-Search-Plugin  - so you can see that it is not a simple programming job, unfortunately, which may explain why Sobi is the only one at present.

[cas]

Smart Search finds my K2 items just fine.  There is a K2 plugin.  I appreciate that it's complicated to build the plugin, but we need our VM products to be found when a customer does a search on our sites.  I'm sure many VM users don't even realize that when a customer does a search on their site, it doesn't return any VM products.  I know there is a separate VM search module, but it's confusing to customers to have 2 separate search modules, not to mention it's double the real estate on the page.  I just hope the VM team can find the time to develop the plugin.  It would be greatly appreciated.   Thanks in advance.

[cas]

Any update when this be available?  We need to have our VM products found in the smart search.

[jenkinhill]

Well it is not on the Team roadmap - http://dev.virtuemart.net/projects/virtuemart/wiki/Roadmap - but it is possible that a third party developer may come up with a plugin.

I have in fact discussed smart search for another component (Community Builder) with a guy who has developed a range of plugins for Wordpress and is now doing so for Joomla. There are issues with indexing or larger sites or sites with a lot of database entries, which is the case with bigger CB, in that not only are large tables created, but due to limitations in the Joomla code, apparently the index can easily be corrupted if data is being added to the db while the indexer is running. He referred me to this page: http://docs.joomla.org/Smart_Search_on_large_sites   which I must admit I do not completely understand.  The implication, though, is that there are potential issues using such an indexer on a larger VM site.

[cas]

Hi Kelvyn,

Thanks for the update,  I just don't understand why a search plugin wouldn't be in the VM roadmap?  Don't folks expect the products on their website to be returned when customers do a product search?  Even if there are possible issues with larger sites, why not at least have a plugin for the majority of VM sites that are not large, and just have a warning label for those larger sites of the possible index problem.   Anyway, I hope the team reconsiders the need for search to work, or can find an extension developer willing to create the plugin.  I know my customers are going be very upset with me the day they find search doesn't return any VM products.  I'll point them your way!  

Regards,
Chuck

[franzpeter]

Did develop such a plugin for the smart search component. The only problem is, that reindexing is necessary if there is any product change. You can see it in action on  http://www.2in1-online.de. You can search for products or, with the advanced search option by manufacturer or category. You receive search suggestions within the smart search module. Clicking on a result page it is even highlighting the search results. But I have no idea how to make it work with the advanced functions of Joomla smart search. It would need some triggering if a product is updated (description for example or deleted). VM does not offer such a triggering for that purpose. I am not intending to develop an additional plugin to make that available too, because it would produce a lot of unnecessary server traffic on our server. I had to even deactivate the Joomla plugin for constantly triggering and updating Joomla content, because with a lot of entries in the smart search (around 1 GB in the database only for smart search tables) did see that just changing Joomla content did need more than one minute per entry, when I did try to save it.
Indexing is time consuming. Did optimize my server and for about 17 000 products it takes around 1 hour. 1000 products may take just a few minutes. It may be much slower depending on the php.ini settings of the server.
If there is an interest for the plugin I'll try to offer it for a small fee in the Extensions Shop as it is. It works as expected with Joomla 2.5.x together with VM 2 but with the described limitations.