miax's sandbox: autocomplete_edit

Autocomplete edit

This module builds on the idea that editors of the site know what the users of their site usually
want to search for and gives the control of this completely to the editors.

The result is a solution where editors of the site have full control over the search auto complete.
From what suggestions shown to end users in auto complete to what hits that selected phrase generates.

• We wanted to use solr search as the site search.
• We wanted to have an auto complete search displaying common or relevant search phrases directly to the user when starting typing a search phrase.
• We wanted to have control over what word suggestions was shown in the auto complete to the end user.
• We wanted editors of the site to have full control over what those suggestions were.
• We wanted to make sure the selected suggestions in autocomplete ended up on a search result page with relevant hits. (This module does not solve this exact problem but with help from the module visitorsvoice (https://www.drupal.org/project/visitorsvoice) we could easily make this work by configuring certain phrases to display certain content.)

What it does:

• Editors have a settings page where they enter phrases to be displayed in auto complete.
• Editors can enter the “label" shown above auto complete list to specify what type of words it displays to the end user. e.g. “Common searches”, “suggested searches”, or whatever you want.
• Editors can add "quicklinks". A quicklink will always be displayed regardless of what the end user
  types in the auto complete field.
• Editors can enter the “label" shown above quicklinks list in the auto complete displayed to the end
  user.

Known problems:

If you have a lot of search phrases it can be difficult for editors to handle them from a single Drupal settings page. This module works best if you do not have several hundred phrases you want to display to the end user. It is in the end a fully manual task for editors to handle the phrases and search results for the given phrases.

Other modules that do similar things:

• Search Autocomplete

We wanted to have more control over what search suggestions was shown to the user in autocomplete and also the search_autocomplete suggestions did in some cases result in no hits. This of course depends on your solr server settings and there might be a fairly simple solution to this problem. But in simple words the search_autocomplete module did to much that we could not control.

Requirements:

• jQuery update and jquery UI > 1.10.