The Web Developers Users' Group met on November 20, 2002, at 10:00 AM in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313.

Search engines presentation

Sara presented the types and characteristics of various search engines including the Missouri State search engine. See her search engine presentation notes for more information.

Proposed changes for the Missouri State search engine

Sara pointed out some of the current problems and limitations of the Missouri State search engine and the group discussed several potential solutions.

Some of the proposed changes the group discussed are:

• Remove the search options (Entire web site, Department Names, Course web pages, and People & email addresses) on the search entry page and merge the results to have a separate tab for each result type.
• Ensure that all of the West Plains courses are added to the courses search results. Sara said she would ensure this is added soon.
• Separate the course and department web results. This would require all course material to be stored on the http://courses.missouristate.edu/ area.
• Separate faculty or departmental research projects from the departmental and courses web results. The group did not immediately decide on the best way of approaching the separation of research materials within the search results.

Sara also mentioned that improving the Missouri State search engine is part of the Strategic Web Plan and that she will be evaluating other search engines to run the site.

Staging server is now available

The staging server is up and ready for developers to begin using it to develop their content in a non-live environment, which could then be published to the live site when the content is ready. Contact Sara Clark for permissions. This storage area is for web development only and is not meant for long term file storage.

FrontPage search form bug notice

The FrontPage search form was causing the web servers to crash and was turned off on the central web servers. Any web pages on those servers that attempt to use the search form will not function correctly.

Next meeting

The next WDUG meeting will be held in the Parliamentary Room, PSU 313, on December 19, 2002 at 2:00 PM.