Urban Giraffe

Search Unleashed extends the standard WordPress search and provides a full text search with wildcards, logical operations, and highlighting across posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, and meta-data. In addition to this, the plugin ensures that a search is performed across what a web browser sees, not what is contained within the database. For example, a lot of plugins will insert data into posts when they are displayed. Because this data is inserted run-time it is not included in any search results - the data is invisible. Search Unleashed performs searches across all data, including that added by plugins.

Some features of this plugin are:

• Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
• Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
• Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
• Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
• Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
• Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
• Record search phrases and display in a log
• Exclude specific posts and pages from results
• Compatible with WP-Cache
• Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
• No changes required to your theme

Search Unleashed is available in the following languages (included in the plugin):

• English
• Deutsch, thanks to Frank Bueltge and Gerhard Lehnhoff
• Swedish, thanks to Olle Hellgren
• Russian, thanks to lecactus
• Italiano, thanks to Dario
• Dutch, thanks to Evert Jan van Ramselaar
• French, thanks to Vincent Granger
• Polish, thanks to Krzysztof Kowalik

Version History

• 0.2.16 - WordPress 2.5 fixes. Fix #153. Add #117, #99, #97
  
• 0.2.15 - Add Polish translation, fix for #119
• 0.2.14 - Fix #114
• 0.2.13 - Fix issues #87, #88, #91
• 0.2.12 - Fix issues #71, add new feature #2 and #4
• 0.2.10 - Add Dutch & French translation, fix #10
• 0.2.9 - Update German translation, add missing localized text
• 0.2.8 - Fix bug introduced by 0.2.7

Installation

The plugin is simple to install:

1. Download search-unleashed.zip
2. Unzip
3. Upload search-unleashed directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory
4. Go to the plugin management page and enable the plugin
5. Configure the options from the Manage/Search Unleashed page

You can find full details of installing a plugin on the plugin installation page. Note that you may experience some differences in functionality if you use an old version of MySQL (4.1+ is preferred).

How it works

Search Unleashed works by maintaining a search index that spans all the processed data in your site. This is unlike the default WordPress search and most other plugins that perform searches against the actual post data. Although maintaining a separate index is more work initially, the benefits are that a search is faster (it is only looking through relevant information) and can be made on data after processing by plugins. This last point is a key feature of Search Unleashed, and an example is given below.

A lot of plugins provide the ability to insert or modify data dynamically. This is typically achieved by inserting special tags into posts. For example, Sniplets is a plugin to insert data into a post:

[sniplet some processed data]

This is fine when displaying the page, but when it comes to searching the default search only sees the special tag and not the end result. This means that any dynamically added data is invisible to the search, making the search itself somewhat less useful.

Search Unleashed indexes data after it has been processed by plugins, making all dynamically modified data visible to searches. The index is maintain separate to core WordPress data, so there is no worry of any corruption or incompatibilities caused by future upgrades.

Configuring the plugin

Configuration first begins by selecting search modules. These modules determine what data you want to be indexed:

Some modules have further configuration which can be accessed by clicking on the edit icon to the far right.

Additional configuration is made from the Options page:

The list of pages to exclude allows you to specify pages you do not want to appear in search results. Typically you would include pages such as sitemaps.

Finally you need to seed the search index. This action should only need to be performed once, and afterwards the plugin will keep track of changes to your posts and comments and maintain the search index without further input.

Note that you will need to manually refresh the index if you install any other plugins that modify posts or comments or you change the Search Unleashed modules.

Searching

Search Unleashed tries to be as simple as possible for users performing searches and does not present a complicated set of search options. Instead a search is performed across all indexed data, and can be made using a similar syntax to what is used in popular search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Wildcards are supported through a *, but only when 'full text' searching is enabled:

head*

This will find all words that start with head.

Words can marked as required or not required using + and -:

+headspace - the word 'headspace' must exist

-headspace - the word 'headspace' must not exist

An exact phrase can be included by wrapping the phrase in quotes:

'exact search phrase'

Logical inclusion also works:

headspace AND plugin = +headspace +plugin

Here both headspace and plugin must exist.

Unlike some other plugins, Search Unleashed allows you to search for words smaller than four characters in length.

Search Modes

Search Unleashed has two search modes. The first is the same as the default WordPress search and is plain text matching. This looks for any text that matches the search text, and does not have any wildcards, logical operations, or relevance applied. The second mode uses MySQL's 'fulltext' searching, which provides wildcards, logical operations, and applies a relevance algorithm to provide more relevant results. The caveat of fulltext searching is that it only applies to whole words longer than four characters (words shorter than this are searched using the plain text method, and sub-words are not matched).

You should chose a method you are more comfortable with.

WP-Cache

Search Unleashed works with WP-Cache without problems. However, if you want to use the search highlighting functionality then you will need to make a change to the WP Cache configuration in order not to cache highlighted terms.

Locate the wp-content/wp-cache-config.php file and add the following code to the end (before the ?>):

// Prevent incoming searches from being cached
@include_once (ABSPATH.'wp-content/plugins/search-unleashed/models/search_engine.php');
if (class_exists ('Search_Engine'))
{
  $engine = new Search_Engine ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);
  if ($engine->is_incoming_search ()) $cache_enabled = false;
}

This modification will prevent highlighted search terms from being cached, while allowing everything else to be cached as normal.

Incoming Results Template

Incoming results are highlighted using a default template. It is possible to change this template by performing the following steps:

1. Create a directory view/search-unleashed inside your theme
2. Copy the file wp-content/plugins/search-unleashed/view/search-unleashed/incoming_local.php to the newly created directory in your theme
3. Modify the copied file as appropriate

Note that the template file is separate from the plugin so you can update the plugin without needing to update the template.

Support

Please direct all support questions to the Search Unleashed support forum. Any support questions left on this page may not be answered.

Bugs & New Features

A full list of all bugs can be found in the Search Unleashed issue tracker.

Date	Current outstanding bugs	Status
06 Apr 2008	Search Permalink
07 Apr 2008	Failing re-indexing both comments and articles
08 Apr 2008	Still Problems with scripts being messed up by keyword highlighting (#153)
22 Apr 2008	Clicking an unrelated Page or Post from search results page invokes incoming results template
09 May 2008	Not Re-Indexig New Posts

A full list of all requested features can be found in the Search Unleashed feature tracker.

Date	Current requested features
25 Jan 2008	Allow searching in other data
25 Jan 2008	Restrict search by category
29 Jan 2008	Latest searches widget
13 Feb 2008	WordPress MU
04 Mar 2008	Search "private" pages only if logged in.
06 Mar 2008	Add Search Meter like Statistics
07 Apr 2008	Adding Multiple Modules
17 Apr 2008	Search for special characters (and regular at the same time)
11 May 2008	Search for full words only

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