I felt the need to explain all this to somebody who can pass this on to the guy responsible for DokuWiki. I wasn't sure where to send this, so I'm putting it here.
Here's my situation: I have DokuWiki (first the "Lazy Sunday" version, now the "Busy Wednesday" version) installed on my server (running Snow Leopard Server -- Mac OS X Server 10.6.4). Out of the box, so to speak, the Search box doesn't work. I type in a word into the Search box and hit Enter, and instead of search results, I get returned to the website's start page.
Does anyone else have this problem? (Perhaps it shows up only on Mac servers and not on Windows or Linux servers?)
Anyway, I ended up hacking in a fix. I opened up the inc/template.php file and I replaced this line (line 671 in the latest version of DokuWiki, in the function tpl_searchform()) --
print '<form action="'.wl().'" accept-charset="utf-8" class="search" id="dw__search" method="get"><div class="no">';
-- with this:
// NOTE! This insertion of "start" is a hack to get my searchform working again!
// Without it, the form tries to send the search string to:
// http://website.net/wiki/?do=search&id=searchstring
// -- which just takes us to the start page. However, this:
// http://website.net/wiki/start?do=search&id=searchstring
// -- does work and does return search results.
print '<form action="'.wl()
.'start'
.'" accept-charset="utf-8" class="search" id="dw__search" method="get"><div class="no">';
Just by inserting ".'start'" into the code, I've stopped the Search function from just loading the start page; I now get search results.
Of course, I'm doing this by forcing a redirect to the start page. I'm guessing that this isn't the best way to do it -- other special functions, like the config manager, append the "?do=" command to the URL for the page you're looking at; they don't append it to the URL for the start page unless you're actually ON the start page. In other words, if I'm on a page called "my_original_page", my hack takes you to --
http://website.net/wiki/start?do=search&id=my+search+page
-- when I guess it's really supposed to take you to --
http://website.net/wiki/my_original_page?do=search&id=my+search+page
And of course I would have to re-add this change whenever I upgrade to the next release candidate of DokuWiki. :-/
Maybe a certain Andreas Gohr might implement a more proper fix for the Search functionality? :-)