Search Everything looks to break five thousand downloads this weekend (if not today) on WordPress extend. I lost the prior totals before I committed all my downloads to extend but I’m guessing the total downloads since version 1 is around 7.5K.
All this with the recent news that WP 2.4 will be including the ability to “search everything”, almost exactly how I laid out in my recent posts on wp-hackers, benifiting WordPress and our community.
From WordPress Tac #5149:
Description
Extend search to include pages and other things. The more comprehensive the better, limited only by performance considerations. Care will need to be taken when including pages in the search results since themes that display full post content may break. Putting a filter that strips tags from page content returned in search results would suffice. The search should be as hookable as possible to allow customization via plugin.
Possible things to search on:
- Post title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Page title, content, excerpt, author, tags, categories
- Comment content, author
- Post/page meta fields
Features that would be nice to have:
- Order search by relevance
- Excerpt relevant areas of content, search engine style
Relevant discussions:
This is great news, granted my sites traffic will take a major hit but I’ve felt strongly that one of the major issues with WP core is the default search functionality. But even though Search Everything will be deprecated and useless after 2.4 I’ll be looking to create a new search plugin that will filter the results, the opposite of what SE does now. Maybe I’ll call that new plugin search nothing.
2.4 looks to be a major milestone in WP, with the inclusion of search and the new backend redesign it looks to be the most noticeable upgrade since 2.1.
