File-Indexer

From phpCMS

[edit] Using the File Indexer

The File Indexer is started via the phpCMS graphical user interface (GUI) in selecting "File Indexer". You get a page where you can set all necessary options:

• The Data directory is the directory where you want to have your index files located.
• Then you define a Start path (a directory relative to the document root) for the indexing to begin.
• After that you can exclude up to eight paths from the indexing.
• The Fields to Index list those phpCMS fields in the content files that should be searched by the indexing process. First the names for the Title and Content fields, followed by Additional fields where you can enter several field names, separated by semicolons (";") and ending on a trailing semicolon.
• Now follow some settings regarding the stop word file. Here you can define
  • whether you want to use a local stop word file,
  • what the global stop word file is called and where it's located, and
  • whether the file should be optimized (that requires writing permissions to that file).
• The Block size you can set next is needed because many providers set a timeout for the execution of a PHP script, so in order not to exceed that limit the indexing is taking place by blocks. Here you set their size, a bigger value meaning that more indexing is done per step but that each step has a longer running time. This setting may need some "trial and error".
• The Word length defines the minimum length of a word in order to be indexed. Numbers, when indexed, can be shorter than this limit.
• With Text length you set the length of the text (in characters) that will be displayed on the search results page for each page containing one or more hits for your search.
• The setting GZIP compression finally should be turned "on" if the index will be quite big or if there is little space on the server. But please note that this compression will slow down the indexing process a little.

While working the space temporarily required by the indexing process is bigger than the size of the resulting index. So please make sure there is enough space on the server. For the time being the indexer does not allow for an update of the index. That means that every time the content of the pages has significantly changed you have to reiterate the whole indexing.

After all the options are set you can start the indexing process. The process takes a while to execute and can be monitored via the GUI.
Important: Start the indexing only once and wait until it has finished or you will end up with a corrupted index!
The indexer works all by itself and indicates when the process has finished.