CustomerCentrix

I found another easy fix to an odd problem. The search box didn't work at all on this site. There was no error message or indication of any problem, just nothing returned for search results. It felt a little strange to be searching on the Drupal site for the term "search", but this quickly led me to find that cron must be set up and working correctly for this to function. This basically means that the page

http://mydrupalsite.com/cron.php

must be called on a regular basis to build the search indexes (as well as a variety of other asynch operations, like RSS subscription processing). In Plesk and other linux installs this means that you must set up a cron tab or scheduled job that fires off at regularly scheduled intervals, hourly seems a reasonable choice for most uses.

I won't grumble about this too much, but a nice simple improvement to Drupal search would be to have an error message that says the search indexes are not up to date or do not exist, maybe with a notice to contact the system administrator about cron. A log message or admin error (like you see for missing directories) would be nice if cron has not run in the last say 2 days.