Blacklight community survey: What would you like to see added to Blacklight?

Here’s the complete list of answers to “What would you like to see added to Blacklight?” from the Blacklight community survey I distributed last month. 

Some of these are features, some of these are more organizational. I simply paste them all here, with no evaluation on my own part as to desirability or feasibility.

• Keep up the great work!
• Less. Simplicity instead of more indirection and magic. While the easy things have stayed easy anything more has seemed to be getting harder and more complicated.

  Search inside indexing patterns and plugin.
  Better, updated, maintained analytics plugin.

• Support for Elasticsearch
• Blacklight-maps seems fantastic if you don’t need the geoblacklight features.
• (1) I’ve had lots of requests for an “OR” option on the main facet limits–like SearchWorks has. The advanced search has this feature. We have a facet for ‘Record Type’ (e.g. publication, object, oral history, film, photograph, etc) and we have users who would like to search across e.g. film or photograph. That could be implemented with a checkbox. Unfortunately it’s a little above my Rails chops & time at this point to implement.
  (2) We do geographic name expansion and language stemming. It would be sweet to be able to let users turn those features off. Jonathan Rochkind wrote an article awhile back on how to do that–again, I unfortunately lack Rails chops & time to implement that.
• To reduce upgrade/compatibility churn, I wonder if it might be helpful to avoid landing changes in master/release until they are fully baked. For major refactorings/ruby API changes, do all dev in master until the feature is done churning and everyone relevant is satisfied with it being complete. As opposed to right now it seems as if iterative development on new features sometimes happens in masters and even in releases, before a full picture of what the final API will look like exists. Eg SearchBuilder refactorings.
• A more active and transparent Blacklight development process. We would be happy to contribute more, but it’s difficult to know a longer-term vision of the community.
• Integration with Elasticsearch

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