Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

I noticed an annoying problem recently which took me a while to figure out, so I thought I'd document the problem and its solution for anyone else who might be stuck on it.

For one of the Drupal sites I'm working on, I wanted to enable the "search" function. Drupal's built-in search is great...it indexes my sites with each cron run, and seems to provide relevant results. Since it runs with each cron run, it's probably more up-to-date than implementing Google search on your site, which is what I was originally considering before I realized that Drupal offers a built-in alternative.

Enabling search is easy...I logged in, clicked on "Administer" and then on "Modules" and found the "search" module, and clicked in the check box to enable it. Then I clicked the "Save Configuration" button.

This added a "search" field and button to the top of the navigation column on the site (I was using the rdc theme, a two-column design with the navigation links on the right). However, the search field didn't look very nice, and wasn't formatted like the rest of the navigation items.

I clicked on "Blocks" under the "Administer" menu, to see if I could configure something within the search function's block to make it look better, but found that the "search" block wasn't even enabled. This was confusing, so I clicked to enable the block, and saved the configuration, to see what it would do. This resulted in my having two search boxes...the original one, and a second one, which was formatted like all of my other blocks and showed up in the block menu.

I went back to the Administer -> Modules section and disabled the module, thinking it might make the first search function go away, and it did...only it made the second one (that one I wanted to keep) vanish as well, and removed "Search" from my list of usable blocks.

Some experimenting led to the answer, which I feel is a bug in the Drupal code. The theme (Administer -> Themes) has its own "search" setting, which you can enable or disable from within the theme settings (this is in the same list where you toggle the display of the "site slogan" and "primary" and "secondary links" etc. This, for some reason, is set to display a search box by default, controlled by the same search module, if it's enabled.

I turned it off, and the problem was fixed...my nice search field was intact, in block form, while the not-so-nice version vanished, never to be heard from again. I can only guess that this was a throwback from an earlier Drupal, before there was so much control over blocks, and before this more elegant block implementation of the search function existed. Since this now exists, I'd strongly recommend that this toggle be removed from future Drupal versions, or at the very least default to the "off" state.

I would assume the same problem exists in CivicSpace, or could exist, if the CivicSpace installer didn't automatically deal with it during the installation process. It might, however, appear with the installation of a new theme, in which case the same procedure should fix it.