Searching¶
Drupal and Tripal offer a variety of methods for searching biological content on your site. Each has it’s own advantages and meets different needs. This section provides a description of several different ways to add searching. The two primary categories of search tools are content-specific and site-wide searching. The site-wide search tools typically provide a single text box that allow a user to provide a set of key words. The results of the search will span multiple content types. Often, site-wide searches allow users to quickly find content regardless of the content type. But, they sometimes lack fine-grained control for filtering. The content-specific search tools provide more fine-grained filtering for a single content type. Therefore, it is often necessary to provide multiple types of search tools for different content types.
There are several options for the addition of both site-wide and content-specific search tools which include:
For site-wide searching you can:
- Use the Default Drupal Search
- Use the Search API Module
- Use an independent search tool. Two popular tools that integrate with Drupal include: - ElasticSearch - Apache Solr
For content-specific searching you can:
- Use the search tools that Tripal provides
- Develop your own search tools using Drupal Views
- Write your own custom search tools using PHP and Tripal’s API functions.
You may not want to consider using multiple search tools, such as a site-wide tool and content-specific tools. The following sections provide a description for use and setup of some of these different options.