Since 3.5 hasn’t officially started yet, I thought I’d play around with a quick proof of concept for the “Spotlight” search functionality this morning. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
There are still heaps of rough spots.
Here’s the plugin if you’re interested in taking it for a spin: http://cl.ly/0E3G2Y1J33372C3f3W3Q
Let me know if you think this is worth pursuing (even just as a plugin).
ahuggins, 
Mel Choyce 7:00 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Haven’t had a chance to download / play around with it, but my immediate reaction to watching your video demo is overwhelmingly positive. Love the addition of a keyboard shortcut for convenience. We’ll definitely need to work through the rough spots, but this is a really good start. I’d love to see it included in 3.5.
Tom Auger 7:15 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Very cool. But how to disambiguate “content search” from “admin search”? IE: on the front-end, users are used to and expecting the search to search through site content such as post body, titles etc. By using the same icon in the same place, just on the Admin side, there’s the danger that that expectation extends to the new “Spotlight” search you are proposing. Is it as simple as changing the icon used? Or adding a label such as “Admin Search” or even “Find Tool”?
Vitor Carvalho 7:19 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
@lessbloat Thankyou!! This will be really good if in 3.5.
Mike Schinkel 7:23 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
@lessbloat This is quite awesome. I would love to see this hookable so we I could use it for the front end of a CMS. We’ve implemented something similar, take a look at http://www.haslaw.com/ and search for “John” or “Real Estate” in the top right blue search box but it would be nice to be able to re-implement using core code instead.
Isaac Keyet 7:34 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
I like it, but I’m wondering how you’d present the regular search functions (i.e. searching the entire site).
In my mind it would make sense if you could search your site’s content as well, maybe have the first, selected, option be to search the site so you’d have to press down once to get to the first actionable result. Of course it’d be even more useful if it searched for pages/posts/etc right there and grouped them accordingly (like Apple’s Spotlight) so you could get to non-action items fairly quickly by a mouse click instead.
lessbloat 7:44 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Yep. Currently, If you don’t select one of the auto-suggest options, it just searches the site like normal. But I agree, maybe the top option could be “Search Site | KEYWORD”.
Searching posts and pages within the same drop down would be awesome. With that said, I’d be worried about how long it would take. Maybe we could cache the list of posts and pages in localstorage (to avoid having to wait for a trip to the DB and back on each keyup)?
Mike Schinkel 12:26 am on July 18, 2012 Permalink
@lessbloat Make it simple in 3.5 but also hookable, and let the community innovate. Take the best innovations and add to 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 etc.
Brandon Dove 7:47 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Love the concept. I’m with Issac though, the integration with that search field seems strange. I guess I’ve never used that search field, but it also seems weird that when you search from the dashboard it directs you to the search results on the front end (but that’s a separate issue). Maybe adding keywords to spotlight searches would help contextualize the search.
For example:
Something like that. What do you think?
Helen Hou-Sandi 8:12 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
You probably haven’t used that search field because it doesn’t currently exist when in the admin
Can we somehow change the iconography to indicate quick jump rather than searching content? Not sure what that would be. I’m also a little concerned about putting it in the same spot as the search is located on the front. I’ll have to play with it once I have Internet beyond my phone again.
beaucollins 7:53 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
I was tackling something similar a little while ago but it was more inspired by the Alfred App UI. The goal for mine was to have mouse-less navigation.
I haven’t worked on it much so far but it is similar in that it indexes the Admin’s navigation and is accessible on the front/back of the site.
We had talked about adding drag/drop media uploading to it as well as accessing search content via XHR.
Hopefully this video shortcode works:
Source is here: https://github.com/beaucollins/hopscotch
beaucollins 7:55 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Here’s a link to the screencast: http://www.screenr.com/vffs
lessbloat 8:28 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Check you out!
Nice stuff Beau! This is way more polished my little proof of concept!
Beau 8:35 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
I think I could pretty easily work mine into a WordPress plugin vs being a browser extension. I think that’s the best direction to go to hook into searching for posts, users or whatever else.
I just didn’t think it would be something most users would use since activating it is hidden. Integrating into the search bar like you have is much more discoverable.
Mark Jaquith 8:38 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Wow. That looks really slick.
Mel Choyce 8:43 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Nice, also reminds me of Quicksilver.
Elio 12:47 pm on July 17, 2012 Permalink
That’s truly awesome Beau. Do all terms have the same priority or for example, if you have a post and a page that start with the same word and you’re in the posts list screen, the one with the post will come up first?
Beau 5:30 pm on July 17, 2012 Permalink
As it is now, the /wp-admin navigation get’s indexed as “$submenu $menu” in the order they appear in the menu. So if you type “Add New” in a default WordPress 3.x install it would filter down to:
Currently it doesn’t actually give you access to your posts/pages from within the interface but that was a feature I definitely desire to add. And it would make sense to be contextual to what page you are in the admin.
Amy Hendrix (sabreuse) 9:18 pm on July 16, 2012 Permalink
Like others, I’m seriously impressed with the slickness, but concerned about mixing up content search with admin search (search? It almost doesn’t feel like search at all in my mind, but that may just be the fact that I use the mac spotlight almost entirely as a launcher and not a content search…)
I’m less concerned about that in the admin (where content search might sometimes be desired, but we don’t currently have it), than on the front-end — the assumption of working with/searching for content seems a lot stronger in that context.
I love launcher-style things and keyboard shortcuts (Gnome-Do represent!), but I’d want to be sure we look hard at whether whatever launch trigger is chosen.
Aside from that, though, both of these visions are just fantastically cool.
Konstantin Kovshenin 9:18 am on July 17, 2012 Permalink
@lessbloat this is slick!
Kurt Payne 2:52 pm on July 17, 2012 Permalink
Absolutely worth pursuing! Two thoughts: 1.) i18n may present a few surprises with string matching and 2.) this needs hooks for other plugins to add their menu items to the list.
Anointed 7:09 pm on July 17, 2012 Permalink
Absolutely amazing, love the concept and is something I could see using someday
As a heads up my wife and I… « Lessbloat 11:46 pm on July 23, 2012 Permalink
[...] are you trying to do” text box should suggest links as you type – similar to the idea here. I will note that while there are 1000 things that we could add to this spotlight search-like [...]
ahuggins 8:52 pm on July 27, 2012 Permalink
Proposal: Would it be nice to have the “spotlight” feature work on the front end search field for admins? Thinking you might be checking your sight out and think I need to “Add/Edit Something”, it would be sweet to be able to use the keyboard shortcut and “spotlight” to the something you want to add/edit. Obviously you wouldn’t want the admin commands to show to non-logged in users.
Just an idea.
ahuggins 8:53 pm on July 27, 2012 Permalink
checking your site out. sorry
WordPress 3.5: Überarbeiteter Willkommens-Bereich | WordPress & Webwork 1:06 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
[...] Aber auch inhaltlich sind einige Änderungen bzw. Ergänzungen angedacht. So soll dieser Bereich vom Nutzer selber angepasst werden können. Außerdem könnte es ein Feld geben, was auf die Eingabe "reagiert", so wie man es von Suchmaschinen kennt, d. h. man tippt ein Wort und erhält dann passende Vorschläge. Eine kleine Demonstration dieser Funktionalität kann man sich hier anschauen. [...]