CB searching questions and warnings

First my question:

In previous versions of CB and Joomla, a person by the name of Joe Palmer built a core search plugin which let Joomla's native search pull up CB profiles.

here:
www.softforge.co.uk/resource-area/documentation/community-builder-search-plugin


I have this working just fine on a Joomla 1.5 site but cannot find one for Joomla 1.7 or 2.5

Is there an addon that allows the Joomla native built in search to index CB profiles?


Now for my warning.

I recently purchased a search component for CB and Joomla called CB-CORE-SEARCH and had many issues with it.

It is located in the JED and here on the Joomlapolis directory as well.

I contacted the developer several times and never got a response...so I went to look at another competing product (CB Advanced Search) after contacting the developer of Advanced Search with some pre-purchase questions I happened to mention my problems with the other component.

The developer informs me that the component that I had previously purchased was an exact clone knockoff of his product that's been on the market for a long time now.

He has complained several times to the JED that this is a stolen or copyright infringed product being sold.

I trusted his words and disputed my original purchase to Paypal and purchased his product instead...I have not configured it yet as this all has happened in the past 45 minutes.

but the product did install properly and doesn't throw off errors and it came with documentation. Plus the developer is very responsive.


Hopefully somebody can answer my questions and that the warning helps somebody not get scammed like I did.

Is there an addon that allows the Joomla native built in search to index CB profiles?

That we provide, no. That others provide, probably; you'll need to check Joomla.org extension directory. If nothing is there then nothing is available.

It appears nothing is available. I have been all over the web today looking at several addons.

there are Joomla searches and then CB searches, and then even some 3rd party stuff that ties into Joomla core search but not one of them are working on 2.5...they install and fiunction fine, but dont produce any results.

and I cant find anything bridging the two anymore.

I dont know how we have survived this long with users not being able to search the site using one search box for everything...it drives me crazy!

I get complaints all the time that the front page search isnt pulling up profiles or products and I have to tell them to actually enter in the community to do a search for users..but then jump over to the shopping cart to search for a product...but then back to the articles to search articles.

My users low tech....they dont understand why it cant be easy.

Best I can suggest is get a Google search module and it'll search the entire index of your site. Ensure you've setup a Google webmaster account and give them a sitemap so they'll have a full index already (several apps such as google crawler to generate these for you). Alternatively you can develop a Joomla search plugin if you like. I may consider developing one if I come into some free time (not likely anytime soon).

That may work for articles and the cart but I dont think it will index the profiles properly. How could it? Unless it immediately crawls the site after a user is registered.

Googles "Custom Search" service indexes significantly faster and more often then just doing "search site:website". So it really depends on the quality of the module as to the quality of your search results. Obviously a user who just registered won't show immediately and it may take a day or 2, but at least it's a sitewide search instead of limited to whatever Joomla search plugins you've installed. It's worth noting I've a Google webmaster account and have the crawler configured for my site and it crawls daily, everyday for the past 3+ years it has done those.

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/