Proposals/Done/Tagging & Searching

Please see https://blueprints.launchpad.net/mahara for proposed features and those that are being worked on

Discuss this Roadmap item, or offer to help fund it so it happens sooner, in the Roadmap & Funding forum

Mahara has tagging and searching features, but mostly they don't work as well as they could. You can enter tags on Views and artefacts, but you can't then visualise those tags (you can search on them using the "Search My Portfolio" sideblock, but that search is limited at best). Searching mostly works on substring matching, which isn't how most people search at all. In general, it's impossible to find other people's Views by keyword search, and very hard to find other people, even those that share your interests.

Some ideas for the future:

• Make it easier to search your own stuff - tag visualisations, freetext searching (basically, improve the 'search my portfolio' feature)
• Make it possible to find other people's stuff - the ability to search other Views that you can see. Note that this is potentially a very tricky problem, as you have to deal with View access restraints. People might want to restrict their search by institution/group etc. as well.
• Implement a proper solr plugin. It's the best way to offer features like stopwords, stemming, spell checking, relevance sorting etc., while providing a very quick search. The inbuilt SQL search can be a simplistic effort that works for smaller sites then.
• Make it easier to search for other people - e.g. by similar interests. This may well require re-working how we store profile information, and indeed what we store.