search_config is used to configure the advanced search form.
- Copy entire search_config directory to the module directory of your Drupal installation
- Enable the search_config module on the admin modules page
- Go to administer » Search Configuration, you should now see a "Advanced search form configuration" collapsed fieldset.
This module started out as a simple means of configuring the display of the advance search form. A few features have been added since thanks to the contributions of others.
In simple use cases the search_config module allows site admins to decide which fields to display on the advanced search form when enabled. This does not stop astute users from entering the search criteria directly into the search text fields. There is also the option of selecting which node types not to index. Once selected they are also automatically removed from the advance search form. This gives more control over the content that can be searched to those who need it.
Search config now has the option of choosing which search implementation should be the default, for example, "content", "user", "apachesolr", etc. The regular "content" search provided by the node module is selected by default.
Three new permissions are also provided, these simple control the display of fields per role and is useful if fields should not be removed globally from the form.
The following fields or selected members of their groups can removed from the form globally or on role by role basis:
- keywords
- categories
- node types
Some of what this module does can also be achieved by theming the form.
A feature offered by this module is to stop the indexing of specific node types. There is no easy way to do this is Drupal. Items can be removed from the search index though and this was the original method that was used. This worked by deleting values of the selected type from the search index using the search_wipe function in hook_update_index. This proved problematic, especially in cases where search_config was installed on a site with a lot of content. No throttling was enabled in the hook and this caused cron to crash. It also posed the problem of search_config playing catch-up in removing the items from the index since there was no way to prevent them from getting there in the first place. I gave up on this approach.
Items are no longer removed from the index but instead hook_db_rewrite_sql is used to prevent select content types from showing up in search results. This is a ugly and hack but it provides the desired result. If you want to help solve this issue of preventing indexing of content plese see this issue: http://drupal.org/node/111744