Fetch & Retrieve - how to make it work?

[w3ph]

I've managed to get Cerb 4 installed, updated via svn, and most everything seems to work, but I can't make fetch & retrieve work. Using URLs from actual searches with #find# substituted for the search word results in nothing showing up after clicking 'Go' ...

I'd like to be able to offer search of a) our news & announcements on a Wordpress blog, b) our FAQs in phpMyFAQ (thought of moving these over to Cerb but there are too many).

Is Fetch & Retrieve broken or am I missing something?

/Paul

[w3ph]

Partial answer: it seems that Fetch & Retrieve wants the response to be in RSS format.

Searching a WordPress blog works with the following string:

http://status.xyz.com/?feed=atom&s=#find#

... now if I can figure out whether phpMyFAQ is searchable this way we'll be in great shape :-)

[jstanden]

Excellent work! Yeah it should be mentioned that F&R is simply looking for Atom or RSS search results (we love standards!).

If some particular software doesn't provide this functionality you can usually create your own adapter fairly easily if you have access to the database. It's a bonus if the software is opensource (like Mediawiki) since you can often use the software's own API to do the search, which gives you better results (using the local relevancy algorithms).

I really need to add an "F&R Cookbook" section to the wiki documentation where we can put these F&R recipes for integration with various resources. I wrote a custom Mediawiki adapter, and I'm currently working on a vBulletin one.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure your Wordpress recipe is added and attributed. :)

[jstanden]

I've started the F&R Cookbook here:
http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/Fetch_%26_Retrieve_Cookbook

[mallen]

What I am looking for should be here: http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/Fetch_%26_Retrieve_Cookbook#Mediawiki It looks like there is nothing built out for advice on how to setup an RSS feed for use with Mediawiki. When emailing back and forth with Cerberus Support for advise on this looking to setup an RSS feed for our wiki so that we can use it for our F and R, I asked what Cerberus was using to generate an RSS feed from its wiki and they said that Cerberus used a custom mediawiki adapter for generating an RSS feed for the Cerberus Wiki. Is there any way you would be willing to release that custom mediawiki adapter to us unsupported?

[jstanden]

Sure, I wrote the Mediawiki "search results as RSS" plugin to share. We'd be happy to support it too.

I'll post a link to the files in the Cookbook in a couple minutes.

[jstanden]

Here you go:
http://wiki.cerberusdemo.com/index.php/Fetch_%26_Retrieve_Cookbook#Mediawiki

[mallen]

Thanks! That helps alot.