Recommendation On Search Form For People

Question

We want to develop a 'Directory' of People in our organisation (a View) with search form that lets authenticated users search for one another by last name or User ID.

I'm looking for recommendations on the best way to do this as we will have literally thousands of 'People' and I don't want the standard widget with 'people' which I fear would be dreadfully slow. All I need is a text field and the SQL equivalent of...

Lastname LIKE('FRA%') OR UserID LIKE('FRA')

...where the user typed 'FRA' into the form. They would get all users (People) with a last name starting with 'Fra'.

Is there a pre-built module that someone can suggest that does this, or can someone provide some (basic) guidance on how to implement this on a View?

I looked at the default Search User tab and I didn't see a way to theme this to include various fields we will need such as the user's photo and so on.

TIA

Answer 1

I would recommend using the views module.

This is kind of a duplicate of your other question How to implement 'Starts With' for exposed filter of User ID, where I explained how to do what you want with views.