Searching for your Forum Posts
As from the 1.0.0.7 release of Lightning Storm Forums which were released on 12th May 2009, forum posts are now being returned within Search results without the need for any configuration.
A post will appear in your search results as an individual list item:
and upon clicking on this you will be taken to the listitems page.
The topicUrl field that is highlighted above is the url your users can click on to be taken to the standard Storm Forums view to see the full topic rendered within the web part.
After lots of investigation with the SharePoint crawler, complex urls, and custom crawl rules we decided that this was the most effective and out of the box way to accomplish the forum posts being indexed.
Updating Existing Posts
If you are using a version of the forums prior to 1.0.0.7 then you will first need to upgrade the Lightning Storm Forums Storage site Feature for your SharePoint site. This is simply a case of de-activating, and then activating the Feature again. Doing this action will add the TopicUrl column to your list. But we need to actually fill this topic url field with information for existing posts. To do this please download this small console application that must be run on one of your SharePoint Servers:
https://lightningtools.com//downloads/LTForumExportImport.zip
Run this .exe and you will be prompted with a few sample command. The first set of commands will allow you to export or import forums posts to/from XML files, and the second will update our TopicUrl field. Run the command:
– update -site http://[url]
where [url] is the path to your SharePoint site where the forum storage feature is. Make sure the Url you use is the DNS name. When this has successfully run the TopicUrl field of the Posts table will be updated, and you can perform either a full or incremental crawl on your SharePoint content to get your forums indexed.
