Issue: Filter out templates in search results (or at least position them last)

On the advanced search form, you will see a section like "Search by Page Type"
If you select "Any" (the default) it will show you results of all types. If you select "Page" by itself, it should show you pages that don't also count as something else - so it will only show you templates if you select "Templates"

However, I see on the wiki's sidebar search box that "Template" is not available as one of the filter choices. In this case, selecting "Page" in the sidebar probably shows templates in the drop-down too (but pressing enter returns search results that do not include templates). If anything, this is a jarring inconsistency; I will look into it.

Thanks.

I would expect a significant portion of users on my website probably only use the simple search (the same people who wouldn't regularly contribute to the wiki and hence have no need to view template pages). So is it possible to (by default) exclude Template pages from the standard non-advanced Xenforo search page too? Ideally when doing quick searches by typing in a query and pressing enter it would be great if Template pages were either filtered out altogether or placed after all other content types (including forum topics and posts).

It is interesting that doing an advanced search using "Search Wiki Pages" (on Xenforo) filters out the Template pages but this is because I've given all the templates a prefix (of Template, to retain some familiarity with MediaWiki URLs) and the default advanced search setting for Prefix is " " (none/blank). So if the simple search also worked in the same way (ignore pages with prefixes) that would also address my issue ... but might not be as useful to others.

I don't know if this would be possible with the XenForo simple search, since I think it is a general search that doesn't apply any filters and might not support that capability. If it is possible to add filters without messing up results from other content types (like forum posts), then I will see about adding an admin setting for simple search filters.

Your experience with the advanced search sounds like a bug; technically, the default search selection for Prefix should match the output of the simple search.

Another option for hiding templates in simple search, if perhaps a little drastic, might be to look at providing an admin setting to not index "Template" pages at all. While this approach would work for me since I'm keeping all Templates in a dedicated Area, it probably doesn't have broad enough appeal with other VaultWiki customers to make the change worth the development time...

Then again, a similar but different way that would still achieve the same outcome I'd like would be to exclude specific Areas from being indexed (since it would fit nicely in the Areas administration section and there is already an option to request external search engines not crawl/index selected Areas on their servers) - this one might be more useful/flexible of the two ideas? A third party paid Xenforo resource exists which offers this kind of functionality but for specific forum node sections: https://xenforo.com/community/resour...e-forums.3476/

Anyway, these are just a couple of ideas should the simple search be unable to apply filters to the results

In the next release, added a new setting under Wiki: Miscellaneous > Exclude Content-Types from Generic Search Results, to both XF 1.x and 2.x.

Wiki content matching the selected content-types are excluded from general search results (advanced search still works as before).
This definitely does not work in XenForo 1.x if you are using Enhanced Search. This is due to XF 1.x search not natively supporting exclusion search criteria.
I expect it to work in XenForo 2.x even with Enhanced Search (since XF 2.x search natively supports exclusion criteria), but YMMV (attempting to exclude metadata fields that are not registered as valid enhanced-search fields may yield unexpected results or error messages -- more testing is needed).
This is not possible in the current search implementation under vBulletin, due to no native support for metadata fields. We could potentially redesign VaultWiki's indexes to put metadata fields into the normal keyword fields, if there is enough demand for this on vBulletin 4.