search

One of the main new features of the Archdiocese of Saint Louis' website (to launch on February 22!) is the much-improved parish and school searching capabilities. There are many facets to these sections of the site; everything is built using the combination of nodes built with CCK, Views, and Mapstraction (for Google Map interfaces).

One of the main annoyances with most implementations of parish and school searching that I've found (and I've tested almost every U.S. Archdiocese's website for this functionality) is the fact that searches are extremely rigid - if you don't type in the exact terms for the title of the parish in the parish database, you won't get any results.

For instance, type in "St. Luke," and you might get a result for St. Luke parish. However, type in "Saint Luke," and you get nothing. Or, what if you type in "Saints Joachim and Anne," but the parish is in the database as "Sts. Joachim & Anne"? Continue Reading »

There are a few copies of the Catechism of the Catholic Church online, and they all have a very simple search interface.  While this might be helpful when looking up words like "Incarnation" or "Purgatory", these search interfaces are not very robust.  What's more, they don't enable readers to identify paragraphs of the Catechism which make reference to a particular passage of Scripture.

Enter the Catechism Search Tool made available at The Cross Reference.  This utility, approved for use by the USCCB Subcommittee on the Catechism, enables Catholics (and others) to search and view the entire text of the Catechism -- paragraphs and footnotes -- in a variety of ways:

• By reference to Scripture verses
• By text (exact phrase, all words, any words, partial words, even support for regular expressions)
• By paragraph number
• By Catechism section

The full content of the Catechism is made available, including the cross-references between paragraphs. Continue Reading »