Feature Request: Control Panel Search Integration with Meilisearch

[bramnijssen]

First off, thanks for the amazing work on this plugin — we’ve successfully integrated it with a client project running Craft Commerce with over a million Products, and it's performing great on the frontend!

That said, we're now encountering some limitations when it comes to searching in the Craft CMS control panel. The CP still relies on Craft's native search index, which understandably becomes slow with this volume of entries.

We’ve started experimenting with a very basic override for CP search (see PR) but after a few days of tinkering, it's clear that this is far from a sustainable or complete solution.

Feature Request

We’d love to see support for overriding CP search behavior for configured elements (opt-in if necessary). Specifically, what I can come up with:

• Override Control Panel search queries for configured elements
• Support CP search filters (status, type, etc.)
• Respect or replicate CP table sorting
• Search results pagination and total results count in footer
• Disable Craft’s native search index for these elements to reduce storage and indexing overhead
• Requires disabled entries to be synced as well, otherwise they won't show up on search on those

We previously used the ElasticSearch plugin which does support CP search override (albeit more broadly, not per-element), so it may serve as a useful reference or inspiration.

Would love to hear your thoughts — and happy to collaborate or test out early ideas. Thanks again!

[johnnynotsolucky]

@bramnijssen this is a really great suggestion, I can definitely see the advantage of using Meilisearch for CP search.

Off the top of my head it might be something around switching out the standard search index logic. That would also have the effect of using meilisearch for any non-CP search queries too.

(I also missed both of your PR's last week, I'm sorry, I'll take a look at them soonest)

[ajp]

I've been working on this module lately, as Craft's CP is unbearably slow for 1.5M entries. This is a client side module, but made it extremely useable for the client to browse data from the Meilisearch index and then edit the actual entries.

[johnnynotsolucky]

@ajp it looks like you've indexed all your content into Meilisearch, and have built a UI to query that, separately from Craft's native search UI. Or were you able to hook into Craft's searchindex logic and sync to Meilisearch from there?