Re-Index all content--what happens?

[RyanC]

Hi, I'm making some updates to a site I set up a long time ago. It's on version 1.9.4.2 right now.

My understanding is for some new things I've added to the site to show up using the search module, I will need to "Reindex All Content" first.

I haven't done this before and am trying to figure out what this does and what it means for the site. Is this a major thing to do? Will it take the site offline? Could it potentially break functionality on the site afterwards? How long does the process take?

Just looking for some basic info before I do this. Thanks!

[calguy1000]

Though we do not technically support CMSMS 1.9.4.2 any longer
and for security and technical reasons (bugs fixed etc). You should upgrade your website as soon as possible, your question is sufficiently broad that I can answer some if it.

The Re-index all content button is a destructive operation. it will remove all of the data from the search module and then attempt to communicate with CMSMS and it's modules to re-index all of the content.

a: Does it bring the site offline: Technically no.
b: Can it break functionality: It can certainly break the search functionality if an error occurs part way through the re-index process.
c: Does it take a long time: That depends on the server, and the site, the number of pages, the number of modules, and the data in those modules that must be re-indexed. Certainly a site with 10 small content pages will take almost no time, but a site with 30,000 lengthy blog articles will take longer.

Depending on server configuration the re-index all content may fail. Which would mean that your search functionality would be broken until you manually visited each page, or indexable item and edited it.

I would upgrade my site to the latest version and ensure that everything is working before I worried about search re-indexing.

[RyanC]

Thanks calguy--sounds like I should probably avoid the reindex. Maybe I will upgrade, it's been such a long time since I've created this site it would be nice to have a new version. But it's a similar thing, I can't have the site break from that either. I'm considering starting from scratch with the new version then just re-building all my content, page by page, style sheet by style sheet. Is that a good way to go about it, or am I being overly cautious?

[paulbaker]

Is that a good way to go about it, or am I being overly cautious?

Depends how much content there is and how many modules are in use. For a relatively simple site you should be able to upgrade without too much hassle. Follow this:
https://docs1.cmsmadesimple.org/upgrading/old-versions
and
https://docs1.cmsmadesimple.org/upgradi ... nformation

[velden]

Well, from my experience - and checked the upgrade code - during an upgrade of the News module (and it will probably be updated a few times in the process of upgrading CMSMS to the current version) a re-index is initiated.

Some time ago I did an upgrade of an old site (like 1.5) to latest 1.x version. It was clearly noticeable that the re-indexing took some time (big site, much content).

In my case I chose to make a copy of the website on my local machine (xampp) to do the upgrade. Not only for Search, but it was one of the reasons. On the server I just couldn't configure enough memory and timeouts to run the re-index. But again, it was a large site with much, much content.

[RyanC]

Thanks for the info, Paul and velden!