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1. Dave Ross
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   I have some good news and some bad news.

   First, the good news. I'm making some big performance improvements to Dave's WordPress Live Search. There wont be any new features in the next release of the plugin, but I think the architectural changes are enough to bump the version number to 2.0. I know in the grand scheme of things it's just an arbitrary number, but it's cool to say. So, let's raise a glass to 2.0. Long may it reign.

   On to the bad news. I'm removing support for searching WP E-Commerce products in version 2.0. I had nothing but the best of intentions when I added that feature, but it's turning out to be a support headache. Some people still can't get it working on their sites, and I don't have the resources to troubleshoot them individually. And you wouldn't believe how many emails I get from people who see "search" and "WP E-Commerce" on the same page and complain that my plugin doesn't completely override WP's search to do products. Sorry, that's not within the scope of this "live search" plugin. It's just not worth keeping this functionality around for the small number of sites that use it.

   This is also the official announcement that I am no longer making extra effort to make this plugin work with other plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Again, I thought I was doing the right thing by integrating with Relevanssi and xLanguage, but support has been eating up too much of my time. Like the situation with WP E-Commerce, people who can't read are emailing me wondering why Live Search isn't returning translated results. After debugging the issue it turns out they're using one of the other WordPress i18n plugins! Until WordPress standardizes on an i18n plugin like Drupal, I can't build in support for every new one that comes along. I also can't keep building special cases for plugins that try to modify the search results in some way. If a plugin changes what WP_Query gives back to me, it'll work. But if it bypasses this mechanism expecting me to call some other hook, it's not going to happen. I have too many people complaining about performance as it is.

   I hope that these changes lead to a faster and more stable Dave's WordPress Live Search. I'm sorry if these changes affect you in any way, but I have to keep focus on the core functionality and deliver the best plugin possible.

   Thanks,
   Dave Ross

2. Bernhard Riedl
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi Dave,

   Wise decision. I also get many emails of people complaining about conflicts with one of my plugins and another theme or plugin. Over the years I tried to stick as close as possible to the WordPress best practices (e.g. established and popular plugins) utilizing as many core functions as possible. Still it's very hard to keep-up-to-date with the number of changes to the WP core (especially the tons of undocumented filters and hooks).

   Speaking of your 2.0 release there's maybe a thing I discovered:

   I turned on the featured images for posts and went over your source code where I found this:

   if(function_exists('get_post_image_id')) {
   	// Support for WP 2.9 post thumbnails
   	$postImageID = get_post_image_id($result->ID);

   I didn't find 'get_post_image_id' in the current WP code, so I took the code from wp-includes/post-thumbnail-template.php and changed

   get_post_image_id to get_post_thumbnail_id

   and extended the if to

   if (function_exists('has_post_thumbnail') && has_post_thumbnail($result->ID)) {

   Maybe this is of any use for you. - In addition I wrapped the post-thumbnail into a link in the JavaScript-code. - This makes the search results a bit more accessible.

   Greetz,
   Berny

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