About 2 years ago, I made a basic how-to post on building a search model that could be used with form_for. I still really enjoy this basic pattern for search forms, but it always seemed like most of the gems I found relating to search were far more involved than I need, providing integration with fulltext search engines, and so on.

I put a simple, but more full-featured, solution together for a project last year and have been meaning to strip out some parts that were coupled to the project and gem-ified. Anyway, I just got around to it, and figured I’d give it a plug here. It’s somewhat similar to a subset of the functionality provided by searchlogic, but more self-contained, with less of the monkeying around in ActiveRecord and building named_scopes.

Anyway, check it out if you need a relatively lightweight search function. I call it SimpleSearch, for several obvious reasons, not the least of which was I didn’t feel very creative when thinking up a name for it last night. Here’s its page at GitHub.

Let me know what you think – does it fill a niche for you? It’s got plenty of gaps right now as it was written to serve my needs, but I might flesh it out a bit more or mess with Rails 3.0 compatibility if anyone finds it useful.