How to use Smart Search in a multilingual environment?

Question

This may be due to a bug or (more likely) to my inability to configure the Smart Search component, but... this is what's happening:

• I have a multilingual site: primary "English", secondary "Italian."
• The multilingual feature is used essentially to show different menus and some content.
• Most of the content is shared and declared as Language="All".
• When I perform a search from the "English side" content declared as "English" and "All" is found.
• When I perform a search from the "Italian side" only content flagged as "Italian" is found (and content from "All" is not found).

In the "Content Maps" there was a "Language" branch with a (bold) indication stating something about the fact that the branch was inactive as I have the "Language filter" plugin enabled (of course I do: is there any other way to make a multilingual site?). I tried to delete that branch but... nothing changed.

I am using Joomla! 3.2.4.

My issue is: when searching from "Italian side" I am not finding content from "All". I would expect a similar behaviours as with the "English side".

Answer 1

I was having the same problem today. On my categories I had a "master" category for each language as suggested on a multi-language website. The normal search and smart search both seem not to search on the ALL language articles. The way I fix it, was creating a third "master" category (with ALL language) where I included all the sub-categories which had ALL as the language. After the "master" categories, sub-categories and articles where all set to ALL as the language, the search started working as it should be. I don't know if this is a joomla bug, or this was intended, but it works.

Hope it helps

Answer 2

After more thorough testing I came to the conclusion that this is a bug.

Steps I've taken:

• I changed the default language from "English" to "Italian"
• Nothing changed: a search from the "Italian side" did not return content flagged as "All"
• At this point, keeping "Italian" as the default language, I re-ran the indexer
• The situation reversed: performing a search from the "Italian side" did return content flagged as "All" while performing the search from the "English side" did not.

My opinion is that something is wrong with the indexer.

It must be noted that this issue occurs with Joomla! 3.3.0 too.

You will forgive me, but (unless proven wrong) I'm going to choose this as the "solution" to this question and of course I'm going to file an issue on Joomlacode.