Aha! I think I see a way its possible and I'm curious if you guys have any suggestions on where I should look to implement it...
I've examined the html source code of generated by the blog software and I can see that the article section comment of <!-- ARTICLE START --> and <!-- ARTICLE END --> to mark where the article begins and ends in the html code.
So, a revised filter will explore all documents on the blog website, but only index text contained between the <!-- ARTICLE START --> and <!-- ARTICLE END --> tags.
I'll look at the spider mechanism for text exclusion and see if I can kludge my own.
Another alternative is for me to add results filtering. The template engine code seems complicated, but if I can intercept the query results list before they are rendered, I could iterate the list and remove certain documents based upon URL so that only urls containing "article.php" are output in the search results. That seems the easiest solution actually.
Do you guys have any diagrams of how the system works, what the various tables are used for and stuff like that? I'd be happy to submit my mods if I can get this to work.
-Michael