The Plato.Search module offers a high performance, relevancy ranked, unified search experience across all your installed Plato modules. Results from Plato.Discuss, Plato.Docs, Plato.Articles, Plato.Questions, Plato.Ideas & Plato.Issues will be presented within a single view when users perform a search.

Enabling Plato.Search

To enable the Plato.Search module you'll first need to visit your Plato administrator dashboard. On the left expand Features and click Manage. From the Manage Features page type "search" into the search field at the top of the page and enable the Plato.Search module presented within the results.

Search in Action

You can see below Plato is presenting search results from Plato.Discuss, Plato.Docs Plato.Articles, Plato.Questions, Plato.Ideas & Plato.Issues...

Configuring Search

After enabling the Plato.Search module you'll see search settings available via the Settings area within the Plato administrator dashboard, these are shown below...

Using the search settings you can set-up SQL Server full text search within Plato with just a few clicks. No database configuration is required.

Search Examples

abc def
Returns results that contain both abc and def.

abc and def
Returns results that contain both abc and def.

abc or def
Returns results that contain abc or def.

abc and (def or ghi)
Returns results that contain abc and def or ghi.

"abc"
Returns results that contain the exact term abc.

+abc
Returns results that contain the exact term abc.

-abc
Returns results that don't contain abc.

<abc def>
Returns results that contain def near abc.

~abc
Returns results that contain abc and also contain thesaurus terms defined for abc.

Verbs
When you search for a term Plato will also search for all verbs of your search term. For example if you search for drive you will also see results that contain the terms driven, driver, driving, drives, drove etc. To disable this behaviour perform an exact search by wrapping your term within double quotes or by using the plus operator, for example "drive" or +drive.

Role Based Security

As you would expect if you enable any roles module within Plato users will only see search results from the categories they have permission to view. The user must be associated with one or more of the roles associated with a category to see search results from that category.