Optimus Bard

Addon by Matthew Fitzsimmons

Optimus Bard Main Screenshot

Takes the content from a Statamic Bard field and transforms it into a string when updating your search index.

Optimus Bard takes the content from a Statamic Bard field and transforms it into a string when updating your search index

Important Note

This addon currently only works with bard fields that have at least one Set defined.

Features

What this addon does:

  • Receives a Bard field from a search transformer
  • Combines all text blocks from this Bard field into a single string, along with the text from a user-definable list of sets
  • Runs some opinionated cleanup on resulting string
  • Returns the string back to the search transformer, which replaces the bard field in the search index

How to Install

You can search for this addon in the Tools > Addons section of the Statamic control panel and click install, or run the following command from your project root:

composer require fitzage/optimus-bard

How to Use

Configure your search indexes using the Statamic search documentation.

In config/statamic/search.php, add the following at the top of the file, below the <?php line:

use Fitzage\OptimusBard\TransformBard;

Also in config/statamic/search.php, add a transformer to your search index per the Statamic documentation.

There are three required arguments and one optional argument to send to the transformer:

  1. The field itself. This is passed as a variable in the initial transformer function, which you then pass to TransformBard as the the first argument.
  2. The path to the blueprint that contains the definition for this field, aka collections/blog/article.
  3. The name of the field in the blueprint, which would be the same as the field name that you're transforming.
  4. Optional: an array containing additional Bard Set types to include in the string beyond the standard text type. This is useful if you have custom Sets in your Bard field that contain some of the information you want to be indexed.

The contents of the transformer should look like this, including the optional array:

'field_name' => function ($field_name) {
    return TransformBard::transform($field_name, 'blueprint/path', 'field_name', ['set_type_1', 'set_type_2']);
},

Your index configuration will now look something like this:

'blog' => [
  'driver' => 'algolia',
  'searchables' => 'collection:blog',
  'fields' => ['title','description','body'],
  'transformers' => [
    'body' => function ($body) {
      return TransformBard::transform($body, 'collections/blog/article', 'body', ['columns', 'info_block']);
    },
  ]
],

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Erin Dalzell for sharing the code that got me started as well as additional assistance, including helping me come up with a creative name for my addon.