The search content type creates a custom search bar that has many powerful search functions, perfect for customizing to the needs of your page or site.
Finding the search content type can be a little tricky. When adding new content to a page, scroll down to the bottom of the content list types and choose Misc. After scrolling down on misc, Search will be towards the bottom of the list.
Once selected, it is fairly straightforward to customize the actual text that comes with the search type.
Searching Types
There are a few different kinds of search bars that can be included on a page. This tutorial will briefly describe each one, then, go into more detail.
Directory Search: This search will search for employees or students in a certain department or organization that is specified.
Event Calendar: The event calendar search will be able to search through different events within a certain timeframe.
Google Custom Search: Google search requires a custom web engine ID and is not often used (if at all) on the BYU site. The Site Search is recommended over the Google Custom Search.
Site Search: Site search will sift through all content types and pages on a certain site or multiple sites and return the matches that it finds.
Directory Search
To set up the Directory Search, after selecting the search content type, scroll down and choose the magnifying glass icon neighboring Search Action Page. Then in the bottom left, make sure the search type selected is Directory Search and click New. Once here, we can customize our search specifications.
Section
Sections keep the search parameters within certain bounds so the search doesn't pull too many results back. These sections are the tags for the site and only those people with associated tags will be available to view.
Filters
By default, in this type of search, Brightspot will have the employee filter that will allow you to organize the search by all or certain departments. Multiple filters can be added to specify different things.
Site Category Settings
These settings will allow the search bar to search through multiple sites that have similar traits as yours (a list will be created by Brightspot for you, but this can be changed). By default it is none. However, it can be changed to all sites, some sites or no sites, to search through.
Event Calendar Search
All three of the Event Calendar searches are similar in what they do, they are just searching with different parameters of each other.
Type
With the event search, Brightspot will use this new organizational filter called type. Type is going to be the content type that will be searched for. In this specific search, it will only be searching for event content types.
Section
Sections keep the search parameters within certain bounds so the search doesn't pull too many results back. These sections are the tags for the site and only those people with associated tags will be available to view.
Filters
Filters further categorize what will be displayed on the search results and what will be taken out. One can customize this by tags, sections, events, dates, and more.
Sorts
Sorts allow for the data, once pulled, to be organized more methodically instead of random results displayed.
Site Category Settings
These settings will allow the search bar to search through multiple sites that have similar aspects as yours. By default it is none. However, it can be changed to all sites, some sites or no sites to search through.
Site Search
Similar to the site search options that have been shown above, Site Search will have options for everything explained above. However, Brightspot will not fill anything out for you and it must be modified manually to fit the needs of the site.
- Types can sort the searches by type.
- Section will return content items only from certain sections.
- Filters will help filter search results by tags, sections, events, dates, and more.
- Sorts will help the data be organized once the search has finished returning all the data.
