Remsearch is a package based on the old Joomla search component. It includes a search module and plugins for the common components formerly supported by the Joomla search component, plus Kunena. Remository also incorporates a suitable search plugin in its own package.

Why is it needed? With recent versions of Joomla, a new complication in searching has arisen. It is the “advanced” search, also known as “finder”. Unfortunately, it seems to be designed to work with moderate quantities of articles and similar. It is far from ideal for a file repository. Some people have used Remository to build file repositories containing tens of thousands of items. The “finder” indexing process does not work well in this situation.

There is also an issue relating to the ability to control whether users can see Remository files in a container. Remository provides a sophisticated role based access system. This can be changed for a large number of files in a moment, with a simple update. However, there is no practical way to force the “finder” index to be updated in this case.

Even in a repository with tens of thousands of files, the Remository search plugin is very efficient and will give a result in a few seconds. It also caters for the exact situation with permissions, and immediately reacts to changes. For these reasons, it seems that for all but very small repositories, the old style search works best.

As it is not being provided with new installations of Joomla, an installable package with a search component and related module and plugins has been created as Remsearch. Prior to building this, I looked at software available from the Joomla project, but it appeared that the old style search in the Github repository does not work. Remsearch is likely to be withdrawn if an official Joomla equivalent is made easily available.