Feature: Search bar

[holdenmad]

I'm a bit new to this, so please tell me if I'm not following the contributing guidelines well enough.

It would be great to have a search bar on the website, since there is a lot of fantastic content. At the moment, there's no way to search all of the content, which I think is a shame since there are so many blog posts, articles, checklists, etc. which people could find more easily with this feature.

[ericwbailey]

Totally appropriate 🙂

We initially had the idea of search for the redesign, but had to put it on hold because it turns out its not exactly the easiest thing to do on a statically generated website.

Is this something you would be interested in working on? How and where would you envision the search functionality being incorporated? I'm asking to help shape the feature for either you or others to collaborate on.

[faraixyz]

As a short term thing, you could add a search form which points to a search engine with site:a11yproject.com in the search input with name q (or as a hidden parameter). It’s how I did it on my website and what 11ty’s documentation search does.

I remember trying to do something similar to the post @ericwbailey linked, but building a JSON index and loading it into the front end is really large. Since it’s hosted on Netlify, you could add a function which handles the search page, but that’s a lot of work.

[holdenmad]

@ericwbailey In theory I'm interested in working on this, but I think it's unfortunately out of my capabilities. I have to improve my skills before I can help. If this is still an issue in several months, then I'd like to come back to it.

[ericwbailey]

No problem, thanks for letting me know 🙂

One good starting point might be reviewing how Self-Defined may do it.

[ericwbailey]

We use Netlify, so this is also promising!

[faraixyz]

Which approach is preferred? A search as a service like Algolia, or a custom solution which leverages Netlify functions?

[ericwbailey]

@faraixyz To be honest, this is out of my area of expertise—I'd likely defer to an informed opinion.

[zoomelk]

Hi I was also going to suggest a search feature, would be especially helpful for navigating all the resources.
I don't have a lot of experience with javascript but could always try if you still need someone to help create this feature?