Only three more weeks till Codegarden 08, having attending 06 and missed 07 due to workload im really looking forward to it. On both days the evening sessions 5 - 11 have been described as "Mingling, Demoing, Hacking, Dining, Good times" so here are a couple of things that might interest attendees:
1. A while back I hack together an ajax search button. I now have a new one which makes use of the ajax toolkit AutoComplete
2. Advanced search. Over the last few weeks while in between things I have been messing around with the umbracoUtilities search code. I now have an advanced search which can search subsections of your site. I have also added a google like search by making use of the lucene javascript query constructor the way this works it should also be quite easy to add new fields to the form that exist in your index. Read the form blurb to understand more. I have also added call to spellchecker.net. To illustrate, you search using the word "rate" you get no results. The code makes a call to spell checker and it will find similar words in your index so it could give you back a list of words like "date, slate, skate" as did you mean words. I have also added a similarity search (need to implement the control but method and NUnits tests are in place) so for a given document it will find documents that have similar content. Before doing the similarity search it will strip out all stop words (txt file in your bin with words like a,the, about, above etc etc). The strip out stop words method could also be used before a search is performed to stop searches on stop words if you really wanted to. You could also prevent stop words from getting into your index if you really wanted. I also have some code as NUnit tests with wordnet.
3. Not long ago I came across dropthings on codeplex basically its a cut down version of pageflakes you can see a working version at http://www.dropthings.com/ in a nutshell its a portal application opensource of course! Got me thinking would be nice to hack it and get feeds from Umbraco so you then have portal features served up through Umbraco. The dropthings site is a web site as opposed to a web application so the integration process will be a similar process to Paul's integration with dashcommerce. I am hoping to get plenty of pointers during Paul's presentation or if I can collar him for 10 minutes.
If anyone is interested in any of the above then leave a comment and or collar me at CG08. With regards to point 2 if someone has a really really big website that they can bring over on their laptop then we could have a go at testing the advanced search features ( I personally think the advanced search is only going to be really useful for people with big content rich sites ). If anyone has any ideas regarding 3 or has gone through the process of convering a .net website to an assembly then your words of wisdom will be most helpful. And one more thing before I forget I have a member exporter to csv but need some help with SQL to get member data out. At the moment I am using some SQL Casey put on the forums with gives you the data as XML and I load this into XPath document and xpath out to csv using FIleHelpers.
