[chrishajer]

I was not happy with bbPress search functionality a long time ago, now I just live with it. The results were always weird looking to me.

Anyway, now I just use Google to search my site if I want to find anything. Something like:

site:mysite.com term1 term2 at google.com does the trick. Of course, the content needs to be indexed at Google for that to work. An alternative I heard about was Google Custom Search Engine:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

I have no idea how that works but it’s an option.

I think doing what you propose with the search results would require a lot of work (having 3 sets of search results complicates it in my mind), but maybe one of the plugin writers will show an easy way to do what you propose. Maybe you could perform all three searches and aggregate the results, then paginate them. That would be easier than breaking them into title matches, recent posts and relevant posts. That begs for having advanced search options anyway. Like, why can’t you search for a user’s name? I thought you used to be able to, but searching my forum now for a known user name doesn’t return anything like “User Name matches”: I thought it used to.

Looking at how a user profile works is interesting. If you click on a user’s name to get to profile.php?id=the_user_id, you’ll see a paginated list of all posts made by that user ordered by the last time they replied (so, that user’s posts in the order that they made them, most recent first) and a list of threads started, I think. Maybe a plugin could be written to replace the search queries with something like what profile.php does, except instead of selecting all posts and threads for a user (which are returned in $posts and $threads) maybe you could do a similar query with your search term, in all the fields you want to check, then return that? Hmmmm…

I think search is a weak point for lots of blogging platforms and forum software, and I think getting it right is important, so it’s worth looking into.

Good luck.

(sorry: edited version substantially)