The discussion “Search existing topics when hyperlinking” revolves around a feature suggestion by SMx to dynamically search for matching topics when hyperlinking a word in a post. awesomerobot found similar feature requests, but pmusaraj announced that the feature has been added to core. The feature now supports searching existing topics, and pmusaraj further updated it to include categories, tags, and topic status. Users like codinghorror, sam, and asirota appreciate the feature and suggest further improvements. asirota also inquired about implementing cross-site search, which pmusaraj deemed not trivial but possible through a plugin.
When in editor and hyperlinking a word in a post, it would be a great idea to write a word/keys and dynamically search for matching topics. Because I’m finding myself linking references to other topics.
I saw a similar feature on some wordpress plugins, to easily put anchors and relate content.
You can kind of do something similar when composing by opening the header search, typing your query, using the down arrow ↓ to select the topic you want, and then hitting a to insert the link into the composer (totally recognize that it’s a power-user feature, and something in the hyperlink modal would be much more discoverable).
This is one of the most useful features in discourse enabling much easier cross linking between topics.
A question: how hard would it be to implement a cross site search in this feature. For example searching an external help docs site as well and allowing searching that content as well and linking to it.
Currently, this isn’t set up to be extended to include other search results. I suppose a plugin could extend that route and return other results, but it’s likely not a trivial change.