Our site recently went through an upgrade and we were advised by Reclaim Hosting to install the new version of AvantSearch. We did but now we have lost all search capability. It doesn’t matter what term is entered the results list is all 13,000 items in the collection. Plus we’ve lost the Advanced Search option.
Is there an alternative to AvantSearch or what fixes need to be done to fix this error?
I’m running the current set of files for AvantSearch with PHP 8.1 with no problems. I switched away from Reclaim Hosting in favor of InMotion hosting three years ago, but it was running fine with Reclaim back then. You didn’t say what was upgraded on your server or if any errors are being reported, or if the AvantSearch plugin configuration page appears in Omeka, or if you are seeing any other odd behavior. Losing the Advanced Search option altogether is odd since it should appear without AvantSearch being activated. Without more information I don’t know what to suggest, but if you have more information to share , I will try to help.
Reclaim ran a “db upgrade for the site” and we initially received this error message: “Public site is unavailable until the upgrade completes.”
Reclaim then told us we needed to remove two old, very large backup files for the upgrade to complete. They did that and the upgrade was completed.
However our search results displayed a list of error messages (“undefined variables”) before the actual results. I reached out again for support and was told the problem was with the AvantSearch plugin. I installed the plugin per their instructions.
Below is the communication that followed:
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Me: “I did walk through your instructions for getting the updated plugin. I got through the whole procedure but when I got on the Omeka site to activate, it said it’s not a valid plugin. I tried the 4.0 and 3.1 versions and got the same response.”
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Reclaim: "It looks like the name of the uploaded plugin directory may be the cause. You had the old plugin still in the directory, but I renamed it to
AvantSearch-old, and then renamed theAvantSearch-4.0.0directory toAvantSearch. " -
Me: I was able to activate the AvantSearch plugin but got a different error message when running a search.
I had also upgraded all the other plugins on our Omeka site and they worked through those to see if they were incompatible with the new AvantSearch plugin. -
Reclaim: “It looks like the newer version of AvantSearch you installed from Github also required a newer version of the AvantCommon plugin, also available only on Github it seems. I’ve installed that and now the https://presidentwilson.org/find page is working again”
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Me: Unfortunately this is when we ran into the problem of any search term entered brought up the entire collection in Omeka. When I informed Reclaim of this and asked for help, I got this:
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Reclaim: “Unfortunately, our team doesn’t know enough about the plugin to know why it is not working as expected. The best options at this point would be either to stop using that specific plugin, to see if someone in the Omeka support forum would be able to help, or to reach out to plugin developer for assistance.”
This is all the information I have. At this point, I don’t care about having the Advanced Search. It was clunky to begin with. I’d like to be able to just search our Omeka site and get pertinent results. If there’s any help you can provide based on the above information, it would be greatly appreciated. And if more information is needed, I’ll try to provide that as well.
Thank you.
This sounds like it’s been terribly frustrating. I’m not seeing a connection between a “db upgrade” and a need to update the Avant plugins, but the advice to also update AvantCommon was good.
However, I would take it a step further and update both AvantSearch and AvantCommon from the current files on GitHub instead of using the release version zips. I strongly suggest this because there have been various bug fixes and improvements in individual filles that have not been included in a newer release.
Your response included a link to your site and there I see that the Omeka search box is showing (it has an ellipsis to the left of the magnifying glass icon) instead of the AvantSearch search box (it has no ellipsis, but has a faint X at the right end of the text box). For some reason, AvantSearch is not replacing the Omeka search box with it’s own.
When on your site, I don’t see any errors in the JavaScript console, but I can’t tell if there are any PHP errors like the Fatal Error in your screenshot. Have you looked at your Omeka log files to see if there are any errors?
Other than getting the latest AvantSearch and AvantCommon files, and looking at your log files, the only other suggestion is to try enabling AvantTheme instead of your current theme. While it won’t look right on your site, I wonder if enabling it would cause the AvantSearch box to appear. If yes, there might be some kind of conflict with your theme, though you didn’t say anything about having changed it. This is an easy test, so I would give it a try.
Oh, one other thing would be to disable the AvantSearch plugin to verify that the Omeka search works correctly. When I clicked the ellipsis on your site, nothing happened. If you disable AvantSearch and the Omeka search does not work right, and/or the Advanced Search does not appear when you click the ellipsis, then something is wrong with the Omeka configuration independently of AvantSearch.
I hope these suggestions are helpful. I suggest you try them in the reverse order of what I wrote, from easiest to hardest: 1) disable AvantSearch 2) try AvantTheme 3) look at your logs 4) update the AvantSearch and AvantCommon files with the latest.
Let me know how you make out. Even one new piece of information or clue could help us figure out what’s wrong.
I disabled AvantSearch and the search bar is working! The advanced search comes up also. The layout looks a little different but that’s okay. At least I’m getting relevant search results!
I’m going to stop here and not mess with it anymore and keep my fingers crossed.
Thank you so much for looking at the problem and for your advice. You’ve been incredibly helpful.
You are very welcome. I’m glad I could help.