Embarrassingly, up until now we haven’t been able to display verse numbers for texts such as the Dhammapada. That’s now been fixed, on appropriate texts you can now see two sets of verse numbers:
vns = “Suttacentral verse numbers”, which essentially are those of the Mahasangiti edition.
vnp = “Pali Text Society verse numbers”, the numbers most often referenced.
These are enabled through the usual “reference” display. At the top of a segmented text page, click on “Views”, scroll right to you see the reference editions. There’s no special toggle; rather, vns appears when “Main” is on and vnp appears when “PTS” is on.
We’ve also added a site footer, which brings some of the site content forward a little.
And a minor accessibility improvement, we’ve added a “skip nav” link that lets screenreader go righ to the main navigation.
Not sure if this is the right place to put this, so mods please feel free to move. There seems to be an issue with the search function. If I search for anything, I get this bar of links appear a few scrolls down which blocks some suttas/sutras.
Then just click on the bookmark to remove the footer. You have to do it each time you reload the page. But it’s easier that going in an changing the style each time.
We changed the URL handling globally, including search, because it was mishandling responses like /Jetavana which would not return /jetavana. So we made all URLs case-insensitive. Which I still think is the right thing to do, I really dislike relying on case!
But yeah, looks like we broke the advanced search along the way. I have to admit, I’d forgotten about a lot of these!
We are EXTREMELY ANXIOUS to move ahead with replacing our search engine. Currently we rely on elasticsearch, which is great, but it’s huge and complicated and relies on a completely different paradigm than the rest of our stack. Instead, we’ll use the native search in our database, ArangoDB. One of the huge advantages of this is that everything will be DB queries, just like the rest of the site, so engineers can tweak things much more easily.
So what I’m saying is, we won’t fix this on the current elasticsearch, but we will restore it on the upgrade. Not sure how to do it if not relying on case, we’ll have to check how Arango likes to do things.
Meanwhile, if you have any ideas or suggestions for search, please let us know on Github.
I’ll give this some thought and add a suggestion to github. For now I’ll only say that the old textual syntax was awkward and hard to remember, but if you want to keep it (for an API interface, for example) you might consider “&” for “AND”, “|” for “OR” (if you want to add it), and, perhaps parentheses.
I’m not familiar with search interfaces. I wonder if there’s a best-in-class example of what to do? Maybe just copy Google, I guess, at least people are used to it.