Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

It would be nice if the namespaces available to be searched could be customised easily, either by the server-folk or the wiki's Sysops.

I envisage a $wgSearchNamespaces to deprecate $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault and $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedHelp in favour of a more flexible configuration

(A Wiktionarian suggested that they'd like:

$wgSearchNamespaces = array(
    'dictionary' => array( NS_MAIN ), 
    'thesaurus'  => array( 110 ),
    'appendices' => array( 100, 102, 106 ),
    'help-project' => array( NS_HELP, NS_PROJECT ),
    'everything' => SEARCH_ALL,
    'custom'     => SEARCH_CUSTOM
);

Obviously, being able to remove the Multimedia option is useful for any site that uses commons for all its media; and adding options is beneficial for any site with custom namespaces)

An alternative would be a set-up like [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]] where the message can be read and parsed (and cached!) - would require less precious sysadmin time.

This might be possible using an extension to Hook into 'SpecialSearchProfiles', but it would be cleaner to fix SpecialSearch::getSearchProfiles() directly (particularly for a configuration variable).