First, let's understand what we are going to accomplish in this chapter. We will create an application wherein you can add feed URLs. These feeds will then be periodically fetched and indexed using Sphinx.

We will create some MySQL database tables to store feed information. However, we will not store the description of feed items in our database. The description will be stored in a Sphinx index so that full-text search queries can be issued against the index.

We will then create search form wherein a user can enter a search phrase, author, and also select multiple categories. On submission of the form we will perform a search on the Sphinx index and filter the results as per the categories selected.

The search results (feed items) will then be shown in the ascending order of relevance.