Document how to write a search extension
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	Tgr
	Feb 28 2018, 3:38 AM

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Category:Search extensions says

The Search extensions category contains articles on extensions that extend or modify the search behavior of MediaWiki. For guidance in writing and selecting search extensions, please see Manual:Search.

but then the page doesn't actually exist. It would be nice to have high-level documentation on this. Looking at CirrusSearch it seems like such extensions are supposed to a mix of hooks and subclassing, neither of which is easy to find or documented much even inline. Just having a list of the right hooks and classes with one-liner explanations of what they do would be a great improvement; having some examples would be even better.

It would be extra nice if the page also explained all the ways other extensions can interact with search (metadata in media handlers, content handlers etc).

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Tgr created this task.Feb 28 2018, 3:38 AM

Restricted Application added projects: Documentation, Discovery-ARCHIVED, Discovery-Search. · View Herald TranscriptFeb 28 2018, 3:38 AM

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SamanthaNguyen subscribed.Feb 28 2018, 3:51 AM

Gryllida awarded a token.Feb 28 2018, 4:31 AM

Search should be doable only by implementing the SearchEngine class in core, the addition of hooks for various additional features are not critical to implementing a search engine, they just gives us extra features or flexibility. I don't know if anyone on the search team will have time to write this documentation, it would take us similar amounts of time as external users as from the Cirrus side it's not clear where the deliniation is between required and necessary features.

EBernhardson moved this task from needs triage to Tech Debt/Misc on the Discovery-Search board.Mar 1 2018, 6:16 PM

• srodlund moved this task from Backlog to New Technical Documentation Request on the Documentation board.Aug 16 2018, 5:44 PM

debt moved this task from Tech Debt/Misc to elastic / cirrus on the Discovery-Search board.Jan 29 2019, 6:35 PM

TJones triaged this task as Low priority.Aug 27 2020, 8:58 PM

• MPhamWMF moved this task from elastic / cirrus to Documentation on the Discovery-Search board.Aug 12 2021, 2:43 PM

Closing out low/est priority tasks over 6 months old with no activity within last 6 months in order to clean out the backlog of tickets we will not be addressing in the near term. Please feel free to reopen if you think a ticket is important, but bare in mind that given current priorities and resourcing, it is unlikely for the Search team to pick up these tasks for the indefinite future. We hope that the requested changes have either been addressed by or made irrelevant by work the team has done or is doing -- e.g. upgrading Elasticsearch to a newer version will solve various ES-related problems -- or will be subsumed by future work in a more generalized way.

Having documentation is literally bug 1(!) in Bugzilla.

Document how to write a search extensionOpen, LowPublicActions

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Document how to write a search extension
Open, LowPublic
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