The default search engine in WordPress has sucked for a number of years. So much so that people end up replacing it with a custom Google search box. However, there is a plugin that has been gaining steam in recent months called Relevanssi that is trying to solve most of the problems the default search engine has. Check out this tutorial on how to install and configure the plugin via WPLift.com. I think I’m going to install the plugin myself to see if it cures any of my search frustrations. ∞
WordPress Not The Choice For Multinational Search
Chris Liversidge of Search Engine Land gives an explanation as to why WordPress is not his platform of choice when it comes to multinational search. I was with him up until the point he discussed security where he states that WordPress is plagued by frequent security updates. This is not true. Security within WordPress has gotten better with time, not worse and it’s not like we’re updating WordPress every two weeks. I’m not sure what Chris wants in a CMS platform. One update a year? One update every 3 months that fixes security vulnerabilities instead of getting that fix immediately? ∞
Interview With Oliver – Creator Of WPSeek.com
What was your inspiration for creating WPSeek?
The first idea of wpseek wasn’t actually to create a public search engine for WordPress developers. When I finished creating a little Firefox add-on called “WordPress Helper” [1] some years back, I was using wpseek as a kind of search result page for requests made with the “WordPress Helper” add-on. The idea was that users can highlight functions, template tags or whatever on any page they browse and a mouse click would bring them to a wpseek result page with all of the information that was related to the search term. Having dynamic result pages for various WordPress-related search queries was basically the birth of wpseek as it is now.
How many times have you found yourself using the site for reference?
Well, I find myself using it quite often along with the official Codex and core files while writing plugins. For easy use, I added wpseek to Firefox’ search engines on the upper right so I can look up any function without getting too distracted from writing the actual plugin. Personally I find it pretty handy, and so I hope it is for the majority of users. I think the most useful information for me is the compatibility info (when has a function been introduced and deprecated in WP core). That saved me quite some time I guess. Oh well, where’s the non-narcissistic smilie?
Behind the scenes, can you tell us a little bit about how the site works?
Basically it is a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The only difference is that you cannot search porn. And it’s a bit more specific and niche business. Apart from that the usage is like with any other search engine: enter a search term (a function, template tag or hook) and the site gives you all the information it has that is related to your search term. This includes general information about the function, code snippets, version info, external links to the Codex, user discussions on the wp.org forums and user notes posted on wpseek.com. There are 8 crawlers doing their job for the site, running periodically from hourly to monthly. Some of them are collecting WP code data from local copies and repositories, others are posting on Twitter occasionally notifying my followers of new WP releases or new functions added to the wpseek database. Recently I wrote a blog post about some of the (publicly visible) bots running on wpseek for those who are interested: http://wpseek.com/blog/2011/twitter-and-the-wpseek-bot/105/
In terms of updating the site with functions, is it automatic or do you have to add everything regarding the function to the site yourself?
Everyone knows that coders (like I am) are lazy folks so everything wpseek does is automated. Means that the foundation of wpseek is – as stated above already – several crawlers and tasks that run periodically in order to catch information related to WordPress code. wpseek currently holds a database of about WP 5,000 functions and 1,500 hooks. It would be impossible for me to keep this data up-to-date on an hourly basis. I do review all the stuff, though. Just to keep track of bugs and inaccurate data.
I noticed that WPSeek has an API. What can interested parties do with your API?
The API allows everyone to get all the data that’s stored on the wpseek databases and that can be found on the result pages. Which means function info, code snippets, similar functions etc. The goal was to be able to make wpseek available for any platform. You could set up an iPhone/iPad code lookup app or a web app to lookup function version compatibility including auto-complete. You could actually fork wpseek.com and make your own. Luckily seekwp.com is already taken. For anyone who’s interested, you can find the API (along with a jQuery plugin) here: http://wpseek.com/api/ Feel free to play and do whatever you like with it!
Do you think WPSeek.com is a better reference to use for help rather than the Codex or do they work hand in hand with each other?
wpseek.com is definitely just one of the MANY WordPress resources out there! And I’m not just saying this because I don’t have another non-narcissistic smilie at hand. The great advantage of the official Codex is that it’s community-driven. wpseek is basically a one-man-show. I usually search the Codex for usage examples. They have a lot in there. More than that, the Codex is like a huge manual for WordPress users while wpseek is just a code search engine. So, yeah, they go hand in hand with each other, just like all WordPress resources out there. I wouldn’t mind a catchall-codex.wordpressp.org-to-wpseek.com redirect, though.
Any last thoughts you wanted to share?
Two things:
1. Good to see you back posting on WPTavern, Jeff!
2. Thanks Andreas Petermann for the regex-o-rama!
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wordpress-helper/
Six Revisions On Missing Features In WordPress
Jacob Gube of SixRevisions.com has published his take on ten features that are missing from the core of WordPress. According to Jacob, these features should be adopted into the core of WordPress for the benefit of all. I agree with some of his reasoning on moving features into core but it’s a mindset that I’ve been trying to stay away from. First of all, I as an individual user don’t really know what the WordPress userbase deems useful or worthy of being in the core of WordPress. Secondly, apart from the search in WordPress sucking, just about everything else on his list relates to a specific use case of WordPress and since everyone seems to use WordPress in a different way, these features could end up as useless bloat for many people. However, WordPress already has a number of features that I rarely ever use but I don’t want to see any more of them added to the core software.
This is one of the reasons why I now support the idea of core plugins. Keep the core of WordPress light, add hooks, functions, better APIs and let the third parties do the rest. Keep WordPress flexible and modular instead of weighed down. Unfortunately, there are thousands of plugins, multiple ones that perform the same subset of features, some that are outdated, etc. Having those features in core eliminates that worry but at the cost of modularity. As someone brought up in the comments, the idea of WordPress Installation Profiles seems like the answer to this problem as certain branches of the software could either ship with a predefine list of plugins for that use case or have those plugins built in. Those WordPress branches would need to mirror the development of WordPress though which means the core team most likely will not maintain them. The installation profile idea has been brought up on the WP-Hackers mailing list a few times before with the outcome being that WordPress.org will not create and maintain these new branches but nothing stopped anyone else from doing so. Dougal has a few tips and a link that explains how to use the install.php file to create automated WordPress customizations.
The bottom line is, if you think a particular plugin should be added to the core of WordPress for the benefit of all, you’re probably wrong. Think about the big picture before you come to any conclusions.
Review Of Beeline – I’m Buzzed Off
Beeline is a service whose goal is to predict the search patterns of users and present those results within the posts of your WordPress powered site. Unfortunately, I have no idea if it’s working or not. If I could review Beeline in one word, it would be LOST. The journey begins by visiting the Beeline website which tells me what the service is supposed to do. In order to use Beeline, you’ll have to download and install their plugin after you verify that you own the site Beeline will be displayed on. After you receive your key and paste that into the correct field within the plugin, you’ll need to wait about 24 hours before the service crawls the content of your site.
There is not much in the way of options. The only thing I have at my disposal to control how Beeline works is to limit the categories that will be indexed. This is where things start to get frustrating because I can’t find any information on the Beeline website which explains in plain English what this plugin or service will do to my particular website. Furthermore, I have no idea where the bees will show up within my content. In some posts, there are 1-3 bees with semi-relevant search results while in many other posts, there is nothing. While browsing around WPTavern.com, I’ve noticed that the bees generally show up within long posts. After finally finding a bee within my content, this is what it looks like.
Finally Found A Bee!
That bee was found within the review I published of the Backup Buddy Plugin. Here is what the related search results looked like.
Related Search Results
I give the search results a 6 out of 10 for relevance. However, further down in the same post, Beeline shows terrible related search results that have nothing to do with the topic discussed. *NOTE* The bees have been removed as I have uninstalled this plugin.
Conclusion:
Beeline needs some polish and at the very least, a documentation or help page that clearly explains what the heck is going on behind the scenes that leads to the results served by Beeline. It’s disappointing that as a user, I can not determine where the bees show up. As far as I know, it’s random. I’d rather position the Bee at the bottom of the post. Considering there are at times, multiple bees within a post, it has me thinking that the entire post is not being used as the basis of the search results. Instead, it’s specific sections or blocks of text. I think the search results would be more accurate if the entire post were used as the baseline instead of certain sections. Also keep in mind that there is no way to filter the results served by Beeline so you could end up showing visitors results that you don’t approve of.
My opinion is to wait until the service is out of beta before giving it a spin.
Adding Google Custom Search Is Easy
Are you fed up with the way the default search works on your WordPress powered site? You’re not alone. As was discussed in the forum thread I just linked to, Google Custom Search was brought up as a way to substitute the WordPress search engine with one powered by Google. I thought about adding Google CSE to WPTavern.com but until I get a bunch of complaints that the search sucks or I find myself not being able to quickly find what I’m looking for despite typing in a descriptive query, I probably won’t go through with it. However, Lyndi of Nice2All.com did go through with it and she shared her experience in this blog post.
After giving the matter a lot of thought I decided to add a Google Custom Search Engine to this site. Initially I thought this would entail a lot of work but I was pleasantly surprised. It went very quickly and in fact it was very easy to do.
Nice to see that it won’t be hard to do if I ever decide to add it to WPTavern.
WPSeek – An Awesome Research Tool
Ever wish you could search for WordPress functions, template tags, function sources, user notes, etc all from one place? That is exactly what WPSeek.com allows you to do as it acts as a very slick WordPress centric search engine.
WPSeek was originally used to be a gateway page for the WordPress Helper FireFox extension but the site has expanded into something much more. For example, take a look at what this search engine offers:
- Results page
- Neat Auto-suggest that maps its content from anywhere within the function name
- Related Codex Documentation
- Code Snippets
- Top Google Search Results
- User discussions
- User Notes
- AJAXified results page; no need to reload page on any operation
One of the cool things you should notice right away is the Auto suggest feature. Helpful for those who only remember the first or second bit of a function. For this review, I used wp_list_pages.
The search results produce a link to the official page on the Codex related to the function, Code Snippets, top Google search results, and WordPress.org forum posts discussing the function and user notes. The Codex Documentation when searched provides a way to see related documentation for that function. The list of recent forum topics also provides a link to create a forum thread within the correct location on the forum to talk about the function. Last but not least, User Notes function like a commenting system on a blog. So far, I haven’t seen any spam so it looks like moderation has been keeping up.
All in all, WPSeek reeks of pure awesome. It provides most of what you need in a very tidy, neatly designed page without having to see all of that OTHER stuff that is typically on a CODEX page. Taking a peek at the coming soon link located at the top of the page, localization, RSS feeds for results page and the addition of conditional tags in search and auto-suggest are on the horizon for the search engine.
If you would like to access WPSeek.com without actually browsing the website, add the search engine to your browser. If you’re using FireFox, look for the search bar located somewhere above your Address bar. Click on the drop down arrow and select ADD WPSeek.com.
Lookup Functions In A Flash
A new site making the rounds throughout the WordPress community called WPLookup.com makes finding information for specific WordPress functions a breeze. Simply type in the function you’re looking for into the search box which contains a huge font size for some reason and click the look it up button.
I tested the search engine using the wp_list_pages function and it took me right to the Codex page outlining all of the information I needed.
For now, this is a quick and easy way to navigate through the Codex as it relates to WordPress functions. Even if the search functionality is improved on the Codex itself, because WPLookup supports OpenSearch, you can add the search engine directly to your browser meaning I’ll probably be using WPLookup versus the Codex for some time to come.