suppose we have a document like a typical forum user profile - it has some text fields, some selections from predefined categories (like gender) and some numbers (like age). Every field widget matches up with a field in the schema and so forth.
So let’s say we want to be able to quickly edit templates for such documents, have them displayed and search through them. The search would go field by field with results and’ed together. So for text fields it would be boolean keyword search, for numbers a number search, for categories a precise match search. Once documents are found by the search they would be displayed in a form very similar to the search form itself - indeed, the template might be the same in both cases. Since the problem is easy to specify generically, there would be no need for the programmer’s writing code to generate queries, they would all get generated dynamically. The schema itself would still be made manually by the programmer, to make sure that all the indexes are correctly inserted to keep it execution efficient.
To me the above sounds eminently reasonable and broadly useful. However, my google-fu is not returning references to any such off-the-shelf components. The only thing I found so far that is fairly similar is “Google Search Appliance” but that thing costs $3000 minimum to start.
Any suggestions? Are there such modules in fact available in Joomla, Drupal or whichever other CMS?
Note that saying “Lucene” does not a suggestion make :-). What I described above obviously can be implemented on top of Lucene or the MySQL full text search, but the key word here is “implemented” - it’s a lot of work. Which is why I am hoping for something already available or at least easy to customize.