Well, for starters, Relevanssi certainly isn’t the lightest plugin possible; it’s a very heavy plugin. It’s also designed for the front end search, and the admin search is something of an afterthought.
So from the get-go, it doesn’t seem like a great match for your needs. You’re probably better off with something else.
You should be able to get reasonable results by setting Relevanssi to index the tags, setting the keyword matching to “Whole words” and then searching with the Relevanssi admin search (Dashboard > Admin search).
But like I said, that’s definitely not a light solution, Relevanssi takes up a lot of database space to achieve that.
Thread Starter
RL
(@lutzryan)
Hey Mikko, and thanks for your response.
Adding search function is something we are going to look at in the future, but not in the plans for 2022. Is there a light plugin that would allow searching the admin database? When I say light, my concern is dragging down front end speed, and back end is a smaller concern.
I have pages, posts, and tags and categories chosen. However, it seems that it is still returning results from meta titles and descriptions. Thus throwing off my results.
Any idea which other setting I need to modify to constrain searches to only titles, tags, and categories. Do I need to specify title in the custom post type. If so, how?
If that’s what you mean with light, then yes, Relevanssi is light; it has no effect on the front end speed outside searching. It will, however, automatically take over your front end search, which is not what you want.
Relevanssi does not index meta titles or descriptions unless you make it so. Make sure “Custom fields to index” is set to “None”. Also, disable post content with this in your theme functions.php:
add_filter( 'relevanssi_index_content', '__return_false' );
You can use the Relevanssi debugger (on the Debugging tab of Relevanssi settings) to see how Relevanssi sees your posts and what content is being indexed.
In general, I think you’ll find yourself having lots of headaches with Relevanssi, especially if you at some point want a full front-end search, but still want to keep this reduced back-end search; that’s not impossible, but it is hard to do.
Overall, I would recommend looking into other solutions than Relevanssi; Relevanssi is not a good match for your needs right now.
