Introducing: Comprehensive admin search

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

Ever since we introduced the admin sidebar, our long term goal has been to bring a more comprehensive search to the admin interface that helps admins and moderators find exactly what they need without having to dig through many pages and settings manually.

This method is so much faster than the old way, and we are excited to see if it helps you navigate the admin interface more efficiently .

Finding what you’re looking for

You can launch a quick search from anywhere in the admin interface with the shortcut Ctrl+/ , or on macOS, ⌘ +/ . This will bring up a window like this:

You will see here that there are several different checked boxes beneath the input. These are the types of things you can search from here:

• Pages - Every page in the admin interface, including sub-pages not shown in the sidebar, and plugin pages
• Settings - Every site setting, which includes the setting description and keywords
• Themes - Every installed theme, whether they are enabled or disabled
• Components - Every installed theme component, whether they are enabled or disabled
• Reports - Every admin report, which includes a description of the report

You can click these boxes to filter out the various types of search results. Here are some examples of each:

Pages

Settings

Themes

Components

Reports

You can also visit a full page version of the search by pressing Enter when results are being shown, or by clicking “Search” in the admin sidebar, which will take you to /admin/search.

Enabling admin search

You can turn this feature on with the experimental admin search enabled groups setting, which you can find in the Experimental config page at /admin/config/experimental:

Note that when this feature is enabled, the keyboard shortcut for the admin sidebar filter is used for the search instead.

Testing and sharing your feedback

We are opening up this feature for feedback now, please post in this topic if you have any or if you notice any bugs that need to be fixed. At this time, we won’t be going much deeper into improvements for this search, but we will make it as good as we can in its current state.

That being said, there are some known limitations or improvements to be made:

• There is currently no ranking of search results, they are returned in the same order as the types of results (e.g. Pages, Settings, Themes, Components, Reports)
• The fuzzyness of searching is pretty basic, but is usually good enough to find what you need if you vaguely know the name
• When you click on a setting, usually it opens a page and filters the site settings on that page, at some point we want a fancier solution which highlights the part of the page you were looking for

[NateDhaliwal]

Thanks for this! Now I won’t need to trawl through the pages of settings to find what I need.

[Arkshine]

Oh wow, I did not see this feature coming! Really cool!
It adds another layer to the admin experience.

I tested it for a few minutes. It works great! It’s super convenient.
The search results are a bit jumpy. I wonder if the search should be higher in a fixed position or not move again to the center. I’m not sure.

The visible focus looks weird:

The transition on the button background makes fast changes a bit trippy and gives a sense of flickering.

[meglio (Anton)]

Consider highlighting the matched search term(s) in the search results.

[patrickemin]

Hi, this shortcut does not works for me on a PC.

[Arkshine]

Have you updated the experimental admin search enabled groups setting?

[patrickemin]

No I did not, just saw this thanks !

[patrickemin]

@martin

/admin/config/experimental

Hi I am on this page :/admin/config/experimental

But I do not see this experimental setting: experimental admin search enabled groups

[Arkshine]

Hmm, odd. Looking at your Discourse version, it should be present. I would rebuild Discourse; maybe I missed a PR that makes it available.

[patrickemin]

Thanks, will try that

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

Since there has been no issues reported or feedback in this topic, as of yesterday, this feature is now available for all admins, and is no longer controlled by a site setting:

FEATURE: Release admin search for all sites

This topic will remain open though for any future feedback or fixes needed

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

Looks good and works nicely!

I especially appreciate the nice tips of how to use / find it:

But we now have 3 different ways to search admin stuff

1. Admin Sidebar filter
2. All site settings filter
3. The new admin search

This would be truly helpful if it could all be in the one interface. Is that where you are heading with this?

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

I will let @hugh the PM of staff-experience answer too, but I don’t really see a problem with 3 different ways of finding things, as they are not all doing the same thing.

Admin search is the most comprehensive and global. The other two (sidebar filter and settings filter) are more localised filters that can be helpful on a page-to-page basis. Maybe the sidebar filter could be removed at some point since all the links are in admin search, not sure.

I know the team does have plans around what to do for “All site settings”, but I don’t think there is a need to remove the filter from any of the other filtered settings pages, e.g. Legal, at this time.

[jrgong]

I have been drooling over this feature, thx guys!

[merefield (Robert)]

@martin

settings filter

I love the settings filter btw

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke)]

@nathank

But we now have 3 different ways to search admin stuff

1. Admin Sidebar filter
2. All site settings filter
3. The new admin search

This would be truly helpful if it could all be in the one interface. Is that where you are heading with this?

We’re taking it step-by-step! We are currently working on improvements to the all site settings page - once that’s complete, we’ll be in a good position to evaluate how these UIs can be merged or updated to better streamline the site configuration experience.