Search

Search lives at {forum}/search and covers every published post. It is always constrained by the visitor's category permissions, so a guest never sees a result from a staff-only category and a member never sees one from a category they cannot read.

Filters

The search form supports:

Keywords
Author
A single forum (category)
Topics only, which searches first posts and ignores replies

Result cards

Results render as post-style cards rather than a list of links: author avatar, display name and group badges, date, a solution flag on accepted answers, and the matching text highlighted in context. The intent is that a searcher can often get their answer from the results page without opening anything.

Engines

YAML

search:
  engine: builtin    # builtin | yetisearch

`builtin`

Zero setup. Forum Pro uses whatever full-text facility your database provides:

Engine	Mechanism
SQLite	FTS5
MySQL / MariaDB	`FULLTEXT` indexes
PostgreSQL	`tsvector`

The index maintains itself as content is created, edited and deleted.

`yetisearch`

Hands indexing to the YetiSearch Pro plugin, which adds fuzzy matching (so a typo still finds the post) and tuned relevance.

If engine: yetisearch is set but the plugin is not installed, Forum Pro falls back to builtin rather than failing. Switching engines is therefore safe to try.

Rebuilding the index

After a large import, an engine switch, or any operation that wrote to the database outside the normal path, rebuild:

BASH

bin/plugin forum-pro reindex

This drops and repopulates the search index from the posts table. It is safe to run on a live forum; search results are simply incomplete while it runs.

Re-rendering stored posts

Search indexes rendered post text, so a change to the text pipeline (a new codesh version, a Markdown setting, a mention-rendering fix) can leave the index and the display out of step with each other. Re-render, then reindex:

BASH

bin/plugin forum-pro rerender
bin/plugin forum-pro reindex

Search and article comments

Article comments are ordinary forum posts, so they are indexed and searchable alongside everything else. A reader searching your forum finds relevant blog comments too.

What is not indexed

Unpublished content: anything pending, spam-queued, hidden or soft-deleted
Private messages, which are never searchable outside the conversation
Categories the visitor cannot read