[Commons-l] Search plugins & thumbnails

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I finally got sick of bug 2815 (search results should show thumbnails),
>  and added thumbnail display for image results in MediaWiki's core search
>  results display.
>
>  Rather than try to port it to the LuceneSearch plugin, I've started
>  rolling out the MWSearch plugin on http://test.wikipedia.org and
>  http://commons.wikimedia.org -- this uses MediaWiki's core search
>  front-end together with our custom Lucene back-end.
>
>  This is definitely an improvement for Commons, where search results are
>  now beginning to be actually useful. ;)
>
>  But there are definitely some UI elements we should improve on the core
>  interface before rolling it out on other sites -- pretty it up a bit,
>  include the search relevance results from Lucene, etc. Possibly
>  additional thumbnails for pages that _contain_ images but are not
>  themselves image pages.
>
>  Some of this will need to be changed in Special:Search; some may need
>  some tweaks to the SearchEngine base class and the MWSearch extension.

Nice! Now people can see that out media repository actually has some
media in it :-)

Now, if we could group the images together and show them as an
"extended gallery" (with size and type information, maybe in a small
font), the real estate that is the screen would be used much better.

Cheers,
Magnus