Social Networking (Facebook/Linked-In) Style Searches?

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NathanM's picture

Basically, I was wondering if it is possible to construct a search module similar to the way LinkedIn, Facebook, and a lot of other social networking sites generate their searches, by being able to choose what kind of content they want to search, (ie users + different node types), and providing an autocomplete field that matches what you are typing against the database. I've seen a couple of drupal sites that have similar behavior, but I'm not sure how they accomplish it. I've attached a photo to give you a better idea of what I'm looking for. Any pointers?

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Comments

The nearest to what you're

sadist's picture

The nearest to what you're looking would be finder.module (http://drupal.org/project/finder) but I've never come across about grouping it into node-type with that module. Nice feature and practical!

Yeah, I've played with the

NathanM's picture

Yeah, I've played with the finder module, but the grouping is actually more important to me than the live update. Thanks anyways, though.

Create a View and Expose A Filter

InfinityMark's picture

You can achieve this same level of functionality by creating a view showing the fields you want to show in the result set, creating a filter for the node type(s) you want to cover in the search, creating another filter (and exposing it to the user).

If you're not familiar with the specifics of this I'd suggest a good book on Views. It's fairly straight forward.

Hope that works for you!

Matt

But doesn't that only filter

NathanM's picture

But doesn't that only filter nodes or users, as opposed to filtering them both?

Different Views

InfinityMark's picture

Well if you're looking at emulating similar functionality as LinkedIn there would be different views for each. In order to be able to use user profiles in a view similar to node-reference you will need to use the module that allows you to make user profiles out of nodes.

So in your screenshot example - people search would look to a user search while other "node-type" searches would be different views.

If you're looking to implement a radio button type of search indicator then that would be a bit trickier but is still very doable.

Social Networking Sites

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