November 2019 Newsletter
Summmary
We’re now using Login.gov to add MFA to our service. We also marked our Drupal module as unsupported, which it’s been for a while.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Integration with Login.gov is Complete
We are officially integrated with Login.gov as our authentication service to increase security in our system. You will now need to provide secondary identification along with your username and password to successfully access your Search.gov accounts.
If you haven’t already, you need to set up an account with Login.gov, and no worries, the rest of your Search.gov experience will remain the same. If you don’t already have an account, you can set one up while logging in to our service. Please be sure that the email address you use with us is listed in your Login.gov account.
If you currently use a group email account, you will need to add individual people’s email addresses as users, and use those individual accounts to access the system, rather than the group address.
If you have any questions about this or anything else, please reach out to us.
Attention Drupal Sites
“usasearch” Not Supported (But All is Well)
As announced in 2018, we stopped supporting our Drupal module as it wasn’t a feasible solution for most customers. At that time, we moved to indexing primarily from XML sitemaps because they’re a core component of SEO and will support search coverage in our system, as well as out in the commercial search engines.
Recently, we noted that some teams were still looking at using the module because they didn’t know about this shift. To clarify the situation, we checked a box in the Drupal Project page settings to indicate that the module is no longer supported.
If you use the module to modify your search box form code, we recommend you edit it manually in your page templates to include the required parameters. The module will continue to work for this purpose until you are ready to remove it.
Drupal 8 has a good sitemap module, which allows to include both dynamic and static files. To include static files requires to go to the sitemap module settings, then to the Entities tab, and there it has an option to select the relevant content types customers want to have searchable within each of their entities. Each will be included in the sitemap that Drupal will publish and update for a given site.
If you use Drupal 7, we’d be happy to talk to you about options for indexing your static files alongside your managed content.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.