Earlier I talked about rulesets in SPOPS, and over the last couple of days have exploited them for some nifty stuff. Implemented Yet Another Full Text Search Engine (tm) -- dead simple, none of the interesting things that DBIx::FullTextSearch does, but it's database independent (rather than tied to MySQL) and easy to understand. I like simple, especially in the beginning and especially with room to grow.
What's cool, though, is the way this works. If you want an object to be included in the full text search, you simply specify 'Interact::FullText' in the 'isa' tag of the configuration file for your class and list the fields you want to be submitted to the search. (You also need to specify an english name for your object, how to extract a brief title from your object [thru a coderef] and a url fragment on how to display it. But you should already have those specified those anyway....) That's it.
Every time you create or update an object, the rule for Interact::FullText gets triggered. You don't need to call 'index' or anything like that -- the rule gets installed when the sever is started. The rule breaks down the text object into stemmed words and saves them to the database, counting up the number of occurrences and associating them with the object. Like I said: simple. But we have plenty of space to improve it, since it's basically a black box.
First public site (Transit Vote) is rolled out now -- I'm sure little bugs will be found with more usage, but I feel pretty good about it. (also need to get our 'powered by' logo onto a credits page or something...)
(Originally posted elsewhere)