[Xapian-discuss] Re: [Xapian-devel] [PHP5] Xapian not compiling

[James Aylett]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 10:06:41PM -0400, Jacob Mahoney wrote:

> Yes, the php-config --version command returned the following: 5.0.3.  I
> would prefer that the PHP extension for Xapian be built, even if I have
> to force it.

You'd have to install PHP4.

> But, as an alternative, I am willing to install another scripting
> language on my server just for the search feature, or even use some
> form of dedicated CGI backend as long as phpBB can manage the
> documents in the Xapian search system's database (it would be really
> cool to have it use just the phpbb_posts_text table for its
> documents).

You can't use a relational database with Xapian - what you need to do
is to install hooks into the db management code in phpBB to update the
Xapian database.

Probably the easiest thing to do is to grab omega as well as Xapian,
and use that with an XML format for the search bit, so phpBB just has
to parse XML (which is pretty easy) to display search results.

For keeping the Xapian database up to data, you can create a textual
representation of the documents, and a scriptindex script to
add/replace/remove them, then call scriptindex from phpBB (using
system(), exec() or your preferred method of forking another
process). scriptindex is part of omega, and has reasonable
documentation - although I recommend you read the documentation twice
through and have a quick play before asking questions, as it has two
different input file formats (one for data, one to tell it out to use
the data), which can confuse people at first :-)

> Any help at all in getting Xapian working on a phpBB forum powered
> by PHP5 would be loved.  And at over 10,000 posts, the search system
> provided by phpBB is starting to lag the system.  Not good on a
> fantasy roleplaying community.

:)

J


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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org