Spent the day on this, since we have a deadline to release the journal site at the end of November. The search/contents page is basically finished. Details:

• The search text box is visible by default, along with a search button, and a More... button.
• Pressing the More... button shows the search filters.
• This is the case UNLESS a search has previously been done using the filters; in that case, the filters are visible, and the correct items are selected in them.
• The page itself configures its main heading based on whether a search has been conducted, or it's just showing the whole list of articles.
• When there are search hits, the hits are shown in context, highlighted, in a block below the article entry in the TOC table.

Tested on a range of browsers. Seems to work well everywhere, although it looks ugly on IE6.

One remaining issue is trimming the size of the search hit contexts. Right now, I'm taking the two preceding and the two following text() nodes, without checking how big they are; I should trim them to a maximum length just to keep the output under control.

The next stage is to implement a site title bar and menu, probably via XSL includes, based on strings in the database; the menu will be a horizontal single-level thing, because we have hardly any content to put in it. I've written to the editors to get some content for the site pages.

Following that, I need to implement an addition to the article display code which allows the same search to be run against an article, and for it to have the same text highlighted as on the search page, so that, having found hits in an article, you can go to it and see them all highlighted there too. Not quite sure yet of the best way to approach that.