Add an administrative search feature

Created on 8 December 2006, over 17 years ago
Updated 17 October 2023, 8 months ago

The attached patch adds a menu search/scout to the administration section, in help.module. Type in a keyword or two, and get a list of matching admin pages back. Links are highlighted on the current page with spiffy bubbles. Deep links are highlighted with half-transparent bubbles.

Updated demo video available: http://acko.net/files/Drupal%20Menu%20Scout.mp4

It indexes the menu item titles, descriptions and help with search.module on first search (takes a couple of seconds). It does not use cron-based indexing.

Because it is difficult to correctly highlight inline and floated links, I only added the search to the top level admin pages (i.e. admin and admin/*).

Known issues:

  • Links highlighted in the sidebar in Garland are dimmed. Can't find a fix for this.
  • Safari is kind of slow, mostly due to the deep link highlighting. This feature can be removed.
  • The bubble style is hardcoded in JS, because it needs to override all other styling on the highlighted element. We can't guarantee absolute specificity for this. Won't fix.
  • Untested on IE.

Things to think about:

  • Maybe include a stemming module by default to make the search better?
  • It would be cool if we could even index the actual page content too, or e.g. if it's a form, the labels of form items.

This is a completely new feature, but one which IMO makes the admin section much easier to get used to.

✨ Feature request
Status

Active

Version

11.0 πŸ”₯

Component
HelpΒ  β†’

Last updated 11 days ago

No maintainer
Created by

πŸ‡§πŸ‡ͺBelgium Steven

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
  • Usability

    Makes Drupal easier to use. Preferred over UX, D7UX, etc.

  • API change

    Changes an existing API or subsystem. Not backportable to earlier major versions, unless absolutely required to fix a critical bug.

Sign in to follow issues

Comments & Activities

Not all content is available!

It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.

Production build 0.69.0 2024