Schedule
We are excited to announce the release of our new Vanilla Search service! This update is independent from our regular bi-weekly product releases and will roll out over the next few weeks.
- Week of April 6th-9th: Staging & Development sites will be updated
- Week of April 12th-16th: Production sites will be updated
- Week of April 19th-23rd: Enterprise sites will be updated
Key Updates
Our new search service is largely a backend update aimed at improving the quality and speed of search, however this new backend has allowed us to introduce some other improvements and new features, such as:
** N.B. These features are dependent on our new search UI. This new search UI is enabled by default in our Foundation theme templates, and can be enabled upon request for any customer using a legacy or custom theme template. More info.
Real-time search indexing
New articles, discussions or other content is instantly searchable. There is no lag time required for your site to index the new content and appear in the search result
Filtering Options
Our new search UI allows you to browse search results by type, and narrow down your results using advanced filters.
- "All" includes community discussions, knowledge base articles, and places (groups, categories & knowledge bases)
"Discussions" includes community discussions with options to filter by:
- Title
- Author
- Publication Date
- Category
- Tags
- Discussion-type (discussions, polls, ideas, questions)
"Articles" includes Knowledge Base articles with options to filter by
"Places" includes Categories, Knowledge Bases & Groups with options to filter by
- Author
- Date Updated
- Knowledge Base
- Title
- Description
- Type (Categories, Knowledge Bases, Groups)
- "Members" launches the Member Search where you can find community members.
Search Term Highlighting
The words you search for will be highlighted within the text of the results so you can better understand how, and why a specific result matches your query.
Member Search
Our new search UI comes with a dedicated space for members to find one another and search on member-specific filters, including:
- Username
- Email - this filter is permission gated to user who are able to view personal info
- Registration date
- Role
- Rank
Places Search
Use search to find and navigate to key "places" within your community. Places include Groups, Categories and Knowledge bases.
- Places are pinned a the top of the search autocomplete to make it quick and easy to navigate to these spaces
- Places also have their own dedicated space on the search page with more advanced filters
Exact text matching
Get more accurate search results with exact text matching and basic boolean operators:
- To find an exact word or phrase, use quotation marks - e.g. "release notes"
- To exclude a term from your search use the - sign e.g. "release"-"notes"
- To limit content with multiple queries use the + sign - e.g. together to produce results that have matches for all terms. ie. "release"+"2021"+"api" will only return results that have "release", "2021", and "api" in the content.
Search Sorting
Our new search UI comes equipped with Search sorting options
All content is sortable by:
Community discussions can additionally be sorted by:
- Top: posts with the most positive reaction score
- Hot i.e. "Trending" : posts with the most comments + positive reaction score
Members can be sorted by:
Knowledge Base articles can also be sorted by Most Helpful i.e. articles with the most helpful votes
- Number of Posts
- Name i.e. alphabetically
Hub/Node Search
For enterprise users with a hub/node structure, public content can be made searchable across nodes, allowing users to discover content they may find useful in another one of your spaces.
