Consider alternatives to Stork

[baseplate-admin]

Hi, from today Stork's development has been ceased. For more information please see jameslittle230/stork#360 (comment)

We should find alternative way to handle search.

Some of the alternatives that we can look into:

• Tinysearch
• PageFind
• Lunr
• LyraJS

[justinmayer]

Given that Stork still works very well and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon, I don't think this is a significant issue. I certainly don't believe Stork needs to be replaced in the near-term. That said, I would welcome PRs that add alternative search functionality as options — i.e., in addition to the existing Stork functionality. I would be particularly amenable to support for tools that are philosophically similar to Stork, such as Tinysearch and PageFind.

[Kristinita]

Given that Stork still works very well and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon, I don't think this is a significant issue. I certainly don't believe Stork needs to be replaced in the near-term.

Type: Counterarguments 💬

My Stork problems:

1. #361 — if I use my search-index.st index file 24.2 megabytes in size, Stork takes more than 10 seconds to load on iOS and blocks other elements from displaying on the webpage. Another user writes, that on iOS Stork freezes the page, preventing users from scrolling or interacting with it for a while. This is a critical problem that caused me to remove Stork from my site.
2. #313 — I can’t compile Stork on Travis CI, AppVeyor CI and Circle CI Windows environments. The author of Stork writes that the same problem exists on GitHub Actions. Because of this, I compile the search-index.st index file on my local machine and upload it to the GitHub repository of my static site. This is not what the build process should look like.
3. #316 — Stork shows small number of results in the SERP by default. If we set a large value in displayed_results_count, then site visitors will have performance problems. Stork doesn’t solve the problem of how users can view dozens or hundreds of SERP results without big performance problems.
4. I don’t think using software that is no longer in development is ever a good solution because if any problem arises, no one will fix them.

Stork has critical problems for me. And, of course, I would like to see alternatives to it for use in Pelican.

Thanks.

[justinmayer]

Hi @Kristinita. While I don't personally experience any of the issues you mentioned, I understand that they are affecting you, and I understand your desire to resolve them.

To reiterate what I said above, I would welcome a pull request that implements support for an alternative search tool, particularly Pagefind since it currently seems to be the most similar and the most actively developed.