Feature requests

[Jordan Bradford]

First of all, thanks for this great software. It has saved us a lot of time in getting a search engine running quickly. I have some feature requests, though.

FTP Features
1. I'd like to second this request for automatic statistics uploads.

2. A separate error message for each kind of FTP problem would be a nice quality of life improvement. For example, the error message I received with a bad password was "Could not connect to specified server. Check server and login information." I'd like to see specific messages for

1. Inability to connect at all (server times out, can't resolve domain, etc.)
2. Nonexistant username
3. Incorrect password
4. Write permissions error(s) (if your program doesn't report this already -- I don't know if it does)

I think the ability to determine some of those things depends on the server (#2 probably), but they'd help people figure out why uploads aren't working.

3. The PDF documentation has nothing to say about the "Use PASV mode" option. It might be a good idea to tell people what that option does.

Configure dialog window
1. The text displayed on the search page's submit button is defined in settings.php, and there's no way to change this without manually editing the file. If you do edit the file, it gets overwritten whenever a reindex and auto-upload is performed. I'd like to be able to make the button say "Search" within the Configure dialog window.

2. Similar to the Word Boosting section, I'd like to be able to rank certain file types lower (in my case, PDF files).

3. Word Boosting section again: there's no way to boost specific words.

Miscellaneous
1. The statistics report page doesn't say which categories people search within if categories exist. This would be helpful information to track.

Thanks again for this program, it's working very well for us so far.

[Ray]

Thanks for the suggestions, we'll certainly take some of these on board and plan to address them in future versions.

Some notes:

1. The text displayed on the search page's submit button is defined in settings.php, and there's no way to change this without manually editing the file. If you do edit the file, it gets overwritten whenever a reindex and auto-upload is performed. I'd like to be able to make the button say "Search" within the Configure dialog window.

The submit button text, and all search page text can be modified via the ZLANG files, from the Configuration window, under the "Languages" tab. You should not need to make any changes to the "settings.php" file, and that is why it is overwritten after each re-index. The text varies depending on your Configuration settings and the ZLANG file selected.

See chapter 6.2 in the Users Guide for more information:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

2. Similar to the Word Boosting section, I'd like to be able to rank certain file types lower (in my case, PDF files).

You can use the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag to boost/deboost specific files. In the case of PDF files, you can create .DESC files to apply this tag to the corresponding PDF file.

However, it is true that you can not currently specify a boosting parameter for all files of a certain type, but the above does allow you to manually do this if necessary.

Also of consideration - the "Content density" word boosting option (in the Configuration window, under the "Indexing Options" tab) will give preference to smaller documents, and lower the importance of larger documents (such as PDF files). You may find that increasing this to "Strong adjustment" may help you achieve what you were originally after.