Since my last post, I’ve been working on and off on the next version of wpSearch. The last version (1.5.5) stands as somewhat of an official release of the plugin, and I would consider previous versions to be ‘release candidates’ due to the growth wpSearch saw since then.
I’m in my second to last semester at school, so the lack of posts over the past two months are attributed to that — that doesn’t mean that nothing has happened.
Many of wpSearch’s users have made note of some very important issues in the current release. Because I have been recieiving feedback on wpSearch in pretty large quanities lately, I’ve been doing my best to reply to everyone — some, although, might not get a reply right away (Sorry!).
I’ve taken note of all reported issues so far, and a future release of wpSearch over the holidays is likely. I have also recieved a code submission from the folks at the Alpha-Beta-Release Blog for KLogger. They have written rolling log capabilities into the class, ensuring that log files never grow beyong a certain size, and begin writing to a new file when some preset limit is reached.
Also, I don’t know how many blog readers have any sort of interest in the Google Search Appliance, but I will be developing a PHP “Bridge” for easy code-wise communication with the Appliance. I am writing this library for LTech Consulting (A Google Partner) — they have already written a bridge in C#/.NET. If anyone is interested, I’ve written a lightweight blog post on LTech’s blog detailing the basics of the project.
Lastly, zinkk, a startup development company I am involved in, has grabbed its first couple of contracts over the past few months, and also has a real office. It’s a big step when a small company started by students actually moves into its first office — there are feelings of “Wow, we did it,” and “We are a bona-fide firm now,” and “Whoa, we better keep making money so we can pay the rent!”
Anyway, we have some very talented people at zinkk, and I’m excited to a part of it. John Bellone, one of our developers, works for CitiGroup in Manhattan. John Crepezzi works at Sun Microsystems. Dan Boston is a doctoral student at NJIT, and Tarcisio has worked for Johnson & Johnson. All of these guys have worked on some impressive projects — many of them open source or publicly licensed.
Oh yeah, Zend put a piece I wrote about writing a Stemming Analyzer for Zend_Lucene in the tutorial section of their website.
That’s it for now — I’m going to talk about a release of a MySQL management class for PHP next time.
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11 Comments
Hi, Kenny – Nothing could make me happier than a new WpSearch release! I still use it on my site, even with issues, but have definitely been hoping your life would eventually allow an upgrade. I don’t know where the issues list is, but two that I deal with (and I think you know about): editing a post after posting removes it somehow from future searches until the catalog is rebuilt. (Hope that’s the right term.) Second, once a search is returned, in some cases (but not all – I can’t replicate this right now) the search box on THAT page still appears, but doesn’t work. Maybe only true when the first returned page includes a term that’s in a page that has been edited after posting? No – just tried this, and maybe you’ve fixed the first problem in the last couple of day – I don’t know.
Finally, have people asked for the search to return titles of posts and pages, as links, instead of returning the whole post/page, without images, and without links and formatting? For me, being able to see a set of links to posts would be a lot more appealing than seeing the long grey columns of undifferentiated text. Hope I’m not talking crazy in terms of the tech required, or duplicating what others have said ad nauseam.
Search is important on my site since I don’t use an index to posts and pages. I send good wishes for your work on wpSearch, with continuing thanks for all you have already done.
More mysteries. If I search for “blackjack,” a term not on my blog, I get a very nice “Sorry” message. On that page there is no search box for trying again, so I know to use my back button and get to a page that has one to continue searching.
If I search for “forty” I get a 404 error. Not so handsome, and also it includes a jabberwocky-ish search box, which isn’t functional, of course.
Something I’m not aware of that I need to set or change?
You should note in the documentation for wpSearch that it requires the mbstring PHP extension. Additionally exception throwing seems to be broken in the included Zend library (possibly because the include paths are wrong).
where can i download 1.5.5? the official wordpress plugins site only has 1.5.0.5.
Just a simple question: does your plugin work also for WordPress 2.7 and may we use it like a widget? Thanx
Do you think is gonna be a 1.5.6 release?
I’m having an issue with the load of the server….
A few nice-to-haves/requests:
1. Integration with ‘external’ Lucene instances (I’d like to search on local files (indexed by Lucene) and on WordPress)
2. Search/exclude for posts of specific authors, categories, tags and time-frame
3. Possibility to manipulate results (increase/decrease relevancy by users after executed search)
JoostH
It’s been several months since you’ve released any attempts at fixing wpsearch’s problems.
I’m still using wpsearch on my site, but I’m getting pretty tired of having to keep rebuilding wpsearch’s search index in order to have it work.
Please give us an update on what your plans are for fixing wpsearch, so we’ll know whether we should just start using a different search plugin.
Kenny – It seems I’m not the only one interested in seeing wpSearch continue to improve.
I don’t have quite the same problems others are reporting. Since switching to virtual server hosting, many of my issues are gone. I suspect at least some folks are running into resource issues with their shared hosting.
What I am seeing is a bit unusual though and appears to be a bug in the indexing process. It only occurs on a few searches. I use a theme that displays thumbnails next to post excerpts. On some searches a blank thumbnail is generated linking to the search results itself – it includes the very same parameters I just used to arrive at the current search results. Odd.
Rebuilding the index fixes the issue but then I eventually find another search that results in the same behavior.
Could you please update me about the new version? Thanks.
Did you ever release an update to KLogger? I just found it and use it (mostly) for debugging my own code. But it would be nice with rolling files.
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