Haystack tweaks for Django 1.7.7. I had to upgrade to Haystack 2.3.1 to get it to work with Django 1.7.7. I also had to update the Xapian backend. But I ran into problems. On my laptop anyway (Ubuntu 14.0.4), xapian gets mad when search terms are greater than 245 chars (or something) when indexing. So I created a custom field that would simply omit terms greater than 64 chars and used this field everywhere I previously used a CharField. Secondly, the custom search form was broken now. Something changed in the Xapian backend and exact searches stopped working. Fortunately the auto_query (which I was using originally and broke during an upgrade) started working again. So I cut the search form back over to doing an auto_query. I kept the form the same (3 fields) because I didn't want to change the form and I think it's better that way.

--- a/podcast/search_indexes.py	Thu Apr 30 20:23:07 2015 -0500
+++ b/podcast/search_indexes.py	Wed May 13 20:25:07 2015 -0500
@@ -1,11 +1,12 @@
 """Haystack search index for the news application."""
 from haystack import indexes
 
+from custom_search.fields import MaxTermSizeCharField
 from podcast.models import Item
 
 
 class ItemIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
-    text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
+    text = MaxTermSizeCharField(document=True, use_template=True)
     author = indexes.CharField(model_attr='author')
     pub_date = indexes.DateTimeField(model_attr='pubdate')