Search feature
Joe Weber
Build a way to search most, if not all, of the content on a website, to find the particular content you're looking for.
Log In
B
Bwe Siteowner
For anybody looking to solve this problem out of the Hoa express solution since they don't seem to be making it any kind of priority, i would suggest you check out "notebooklm.google.com" . This is a free product that Google offers. NotebookLM allows you to load a whole bunch of content in the form of PDFs and documents l\and even links to webpages and then it gives you an automatic chat device that you can use. I used this to create a vault of our official condo rules and laws and articles, copied thatthat URL for the chat back into our webpage and was able to summarize all the information in an easy to use chat format. (see page below). For example, I included all of our 10 or so Condo documents and declarations and rules in this chat base and then created a chat bot. I also took all of the text of the law from Florida, which is where our condo is from and included another chat, but if people wanted to ask questions about Florida condo law. I incorporated them on our rules page and made that available to all of the owners. The nice part was it was free and easy to do.
It's a non technical solution (ZERO coding knowledge required) and worked pretty well. Thsi doesn't work for new documents (aka next month's minutes) but it does work well for static sets of documents that you want owners to be able to search. Hope this help! sikerr@gmail.com
B
Bwe Siteowner
Where is this functionality??? It’s vital to add it.
Meredith Owens
Bwe Siteowner: Thank you for sharing with our team that having this capability is important to your community. While we don't have an estimated timeframe for this yet, the feature request is still on our team's radar!
Also, your vote has been added to this post, so you'll be notified once they update its status.
B
Bwe Siteowner
Meredith Owens . thank you for responding. This is VERY significant request and likely more important for many of us than minor feature updates. With hundreds of folks looking for it, why is this is not a more prominent point on your product plan???? It seems clear that many of us find this crucial and yet YEARS have gone by with zero effort from HOA Express to solve this issue. CAN YOU PLEASE ESCALATE THIS ISSUE INTERNALLY??
Meredith Owens
Bwe Siteowner: I understand how seeing that this feature request has been open for several years might make you think we're not considering this request. However, I can assure you that the amount of time a post has been opened doesn't correlate with whether our team is still considering implementing it! Several factors come into play when deciding which feature requests to develop and when. You can read more about how we approach this in the following article: https://help.hoa-express.com/en/articles/2347346-how-feedback-change-requests-and-suggestions-are-handled.
Over the last several years, our product team's primary goal has been to finish developing our next gen front ends. This is an enormous project for our team, as it's a total rewrite of the existing front ends using new cutting-edge technology and design. We've prioritized this because improving the front ends considerably allows us to release new features faster. More information is available about this here: https://blog.hoa-express.com/hello-next-gen-front-ends/.
Since starting this, our product team has already made significant progress by releasing the Admin Portal, developing a page management experience in the Admin Portal, and updating our company website. The last major piece of this project is developing the new front ends for our community websites. The websites will need to be running on our new front ends before we can develop a sitewide search feature.
In the meantime, we've continued to release other new features and improvements! You can review those here: https://feedback.hoa-express.com/changelog.
While we don't have a set timeframe for developing this particular feature request yet, since your vote has been added to the post, you'll be notified via email when we update its status.
Susan Biel
Yes! SEARCH! An integral part of any website! I even need it as I forget where I put stuff.
Wes Cossick
Merged in a post:
Search feature (front end)
John Provasnik
It would be awesome if there could be a search feature integrated into the community site's front-end so users can search for content. This would be helpful to users who, for example, want to quickly find something about "deck replacement" -- the idea is it could return pages that have "deck replacement" in the title or body of the page so they don't have to hunt through the navigation menu to try and figure out which page that might located on. Or if a user wants to know what pesticides are used and can't quite find the information in the FAQ, maybe it can return the page or particular FAQ that contains the word "pesticide"
John Middleton
As others have mentioned, even though our website is well organized, we get complaints from users on the difficulty of quickly finding what they are looking for. I am adding my vote to make this a high priority. It has been 5 years since Joe Weber's initial request. i would rather not wait another 5 years. How soon before you build it into your time frame?
P
Patrick Condon
Given HOA Express has such a robust platform, it is hard to fathom why Search is missing. It is of critical importance. Without it, there will be resistance in my community to adopting HOA Express.
Gina Arasin
When we were evaluating HOA Express for our community website, I asked about this important feature (which existed on our previous site. . .and is a basic feature of most). I was told it's was a known requirement. . .and passed that on to our decision committee.
Our website is very well organized; however, without the search capability (for documents and other web content), we continue to get complaints from our HOA Board and users.
What is the status of this feature request. . .are you considering addressing it any time soon?
Meredith Owens
Gina Arasin: This feature request is still on our radar! Our product team's current priority is finishing modernizing our front ends, which is a layered project.
They're wrapping up developing the new page management experience in the Admin Portal and modernizing our company website. Following that, they'll start updating the front ends of the community websites. Once they've completed this, the new front ends will allow them to add new features, like implementing a website-wide search function.
While we don't have a set timeframe for this feature request yet, we are making progress toward being able to develop this! Also, your vote has been added to this post, so you'll be notified once they update its status.
T
Test Account Cieslak
There is a product called ChatPDF that allow the searching of one or more PDF files using AI. It might be worth investigating to see if it could be added to the web service, maybe at additional charge. It should also include text that is on web pages exclusive of PDF's. I would guess that over 90% of the web site contents are PDF's. You could charge an additional monthly fee for its use or allow a credit for x AI queries/month similar to your credits for SMS messages. This would also give HOA-Express the ability to advertise that it now includes AI functionality.
T
Tom Hanschen
5 years of asking for a standard, basic operation: SEARCH. Unfathomable that it is not done yet. It's getting very difficult to continue to justify HOA to the 2 communities I run.
Meredith Owens
Merged in a post:
Ability to search site
Denise Richards
We really need to be able to search our website content. We get complaints all the time about there being no way to search for a document. The web browser various search engines do not do this.
For instance, your support page has a way to search for articles. That is the kind of search capability we need.
Load More
→