Hello Wikimedia developers!
I've just deployed the latest batch of Phabricator updates. Normally I
wouldn't write an announcement for routine upgrades, however, this update
is different. This week's update includes notable improvements to
Phabricator's global search functionality which I have been working on for
the past week.
*Bugs Fixed:*
Several minor bugs have been resolved, most notably, longstanding bug which
prevented viewing results numbered 100+ has been resolved [1].
*Better Search Results:*
There have been many small improvements to search query parsing,
performance & reliability in the past few weeks. A few of these are
launching today but the most visible change is a significantly improved
search results page with document body highlighting[2]. This feature shows
a snippet of documents with the matching search terms highlighted in bold.
Previously, Phabricator only displayed the title of each result with
matching terms highlighted only if they appeared within the title. With
today's release, the matching terms are highlighted from the body of the
document as well and this takes advantage of an Elasticsearch feature[3] to
accurately highlight the terms which actually lead to the result being
included in the search result.
*Welcome to The Future:*
Some of you might be thinking that this is just too much. Such unnecessary
features are just extravagant and wasteful. To that I say: why should we
let advanced technologies like cascading style sheets sit idle, neglected.
We can do better than a 1970s search experience. We deserve to have our
search terms rendered as stylized hypertext with bold, beautiful letters
and contextually accurate emphasis. We deserve modern conveniences and I
don't feel the least bit guilty about that. It's the 90s[4], after all.
*Upstream Status:*
This new functionality has been submitted upstream for inclusion in
Phabricator, however, as of today it remains in differential pending code
review. The feature is likely to evolve further before finally making it
into the upstream. It is a fairly large patch which adds a new "Engine
Extension" infrastructure to phabricator.
This foundation can be used to add various enhancements to the search
results views (e.g. customized views for each object type.) This also lays
the foundation for resolving
https://secure.phabricator.com/T8646, although
that bug doesn't really affect Wikimedia's developers because we have
disabled Phabricator's integrated wiki.
1.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92960
2.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T162284
3.
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-requ…
4.
https://vimeo.com/29455771
That's all for now, I hope you enjoy these improvements to Phabricator
search experience!
Mukunda Modell
Release Engineer & Phabricator Admin
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.