Current version: 0.1

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Note: Advanced Search Lite has been merged with the “big” Advanced Search. However, Advanced Search 2.0 and higher are only compatible with WordPress versions higher than 2.3. Therefore, the old version of Advanced Search Lite, which is still 100% perfect for WP 2.0.x installations, will stay available from this page.

The AdvancedSearch Lite is the little brother of the popular Zirona AdvancedSearch. It is a drop-in replacement for the legacy WordPress search which will boost the quality of your searching the very instant you activate it, by using the powerful MySQL fulltext search. It also provides an easy to implement search form with extra features, and as a special topping, it will apply a multi-color search term highlighting to the search results.

The AdvancedSearch Lite plugin is Free Software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Features

  • Intelligent Search: Searches for words, not character strings
  • Supports usage of boolean operators
  • Nice, yet optional sidebar search form with extra features
  • Search results can be ranked by relevance or date (optional)
  • A blog owner can fully customize the search form

Overview

Installation

… takes less than a minute:

Download

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  • Download it,
  • Unpack it and upload the folder advancedsearch-lite to your plugins directory,
  • Activate the plugin in your admin panel: from this moment, the new search is in action. (You can test the new behaviour by searching two words which stand at different positions within one post.)

If you want the neat sidebar form, it’s just 2 minutes more:

  • Insert the code <?php if (function_exists('asl_form')) echo asl_form(); ?> somewhere in your sidebar,
  • Take the contents of the file asl.css and add them to your main CSS (of course you may change the CSS as you like),
  • The function asl_form() has three optional boolean-type parameters to modify the displaying of certain elements: the first for displaying the title “Search” or not, the second for displaying the “sort by” section or not, the third for displaying the credits or not. For example, calling the function like asl_form(false, false, false) would provide a quite minimalistic search form.

Upgrading

If you are upgrading, delete the AdvancedSearch Lite plugin folder from your wp-content/plugins directory, then proceed as described above.

Translations

There are localized versions included with the plugin download in the following languages:

  • German, search form and hints popup,
  • French, kindly provided by Luc Saint-Elie: search form (translator for hints popup wanted!),
  • Spanish, kindly provided by Trebol-A: search form and hints popup,
  • Italian, kindly provided by Andrea Barbieri: search form and hints popup,
  • Czech, kindly provided by Martin Štěpán: search form and hints popup (included with the plugin download).

If you want to translate the plugin to your own language, please read the Localisation section from the Advanced Usage page.

Background

The plugin uses the fulltext feature of MySQL. When you activate the plugin, it will add FULLTEXT indices to the columns post_title, post_content and comment_content. This is nothing to worry about, and you can (but don’t need to) remove it if you decide to uninstall the plugin. To understand the implications of the MySQL fulltext feature, please have a look into the according chapter of the MySQL documentation.

What else?

Feedback and improvments are as always highly welcome. Please leave a comment below. Have a lot of fun with the AdvancedSearch Lite plugin!

In case you need individual, advanced support: Zirona also provides professional support for this software and its integration on your website (as well as WordPress support in general). Please don’t hesitate to contact us and ask about our services.

58 Kommentare zu „AdvancedSearch Lite plugin for WordPress“

  1. Jim am 13. März 2007 um 14:13 #

    It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately, I noticed that the legacy search in WordPress gets more complete and accurate searches than does this plugin. As a result, I’ve reverted back to the legacy form.

  2. Alex Günsche am 13. März 2007 um 15:05 #

    Well, that depends. Especially when you have quite a large blog, the MySQL Fulltext search will return more relevant results. Besides, it also has a much better performance, because it works index-based. Which search terms did you actually try?

  3. Robert am 13. März 2007 um 18:38 #

    Thanks! Works great…… took only 15 minutes to install and style it.

  4. Paul Strauss am 13. März 2007 um 22:39 #

    I gave your plug-in a spin, and it runs significantly faster than the standard search.

    However, I’m having a problem where it seems like words with 3 or less characters aren’t coming up in search results. For example, if you search for “usb”, “car” or “pc” on my site with the standard search, it finds results, but with your plug-in, it doesn’t. Words with 4 or more characters seem to work fine.

    For now, I had to turn off the plug-in until this can be resolved.

    Any ideas?

  5. Alex Günsche am 13. März 2007 um 22:45 #

    Yes, this is indeed a known problem with the MySQL fulltext search. By default, it only indexes words with at least four characters. It is possible to decrease this number, but you need administrative access to your server, or you could ask your hoster. Have a look at the Advanced usage docs (lower part) and at the relevant MySQL docs.

  6. Paul Strauss am 13. März 2007 um 23:44 #

    Unfortunately, my host doesn’t give me such permissions, and I know they won’t make such changes for me. They’re pretty bad about things like that.

    Too bad. Maybe I could write a patch that uses your search if there are more than 3 chars and the Wordpress search if there are less than 4 in any of the words.

  7. Alex Günsche am 13. März 2007 um 23:54 #

    Yes, that’s a pitty. But in this case, I could understand it… changing the ft_min_length parameter could (temporarily) break other databases using this feature, which is certainly not very desired by the admins.

    You’re right, such a workaround wouldn’t be hard to implement. I think I can also do it for one of the next versions.

  8. Paul Strauss am 13. März 2007 um 23:57 #

    That would be a great addition, since at least that would make searches run much faster for the majority of queries.

  9. Theo Bakker am 15. März 2007 um 18:05 #

    Sounds interesting. Does your plugin support blogroll search?

  10. Alex Günsche am 15. März 2007 um 18:27 #

    No, it doesn’t. Link categories are not searched.

  11. saigon am 16. März 2007 um 02:28 #

    is there a way this plugin stop giving file atachments as results

    post and pages is ok but it search in images descriptions and add them as a result

  12. Fred am 16. März 2007 um 07:10 #

    Do you have any idea how (or if) the sidebar form can be implemented in a widget theme (Tiga, in this case) ?

    Thanks.

  13. Alex Günsche am 16. März 2007 um 10:10 #

    saigon: yes, you can exclude attachments in the SQL query.

    Fred: As far as I know, it should be possible to open the sidebar.php with a text editor and insert the code just as usual.

  14. saigon am 16. März 2007 um 15:49 #

    “saigon: yes, you can exclude attachments in the SQL query.”

    any hint how ??? im lost here

  15. Kirk M am 16. März 2007 um 17:24 #

    On search terms limited to at least 4 characters, the problem can be solved by adding wildcards to fill in the required amount of missing characters ie:

    the*, as**, a***

    This has worked for me so far.

  16. thomas am 18. März 2007 um 13:59 #

    hallo leute,

    super plugin, ich hab aber leider ein gröberen bug entdeckt, zumindest denk ich das ;-)

    http://develop.servus.at/thomasd/wordpress/

    und zwar: versuch mal auf der such seite nach test zu suchen = 2 ergebnisse.
    wenn du nochmals suchst und Kommentare abwählst, bekommt man mehr ergebnisse - dass dürfte aber nicht passieren, oder?

    verwendete wp version 2.1.2
    verwendet plugin version 0.6

  17. Barbara am 21. März 2007 um 17:54 #

    Hallo Alex, lässt sich das Plugin so einstellen, dass als Wildcard ein Fragezeichen benutzt werden kann?

  18. Alex Günsche am 22. März 2007 um 18:35 #

    Thomas: Danke für den Hinweis. Der Fehler wurde auch von einem anderen Anwender schon gemeldet. Das Problem ist etwas vertrackt, wird aber vermutlich in der nächsten Version korrigiert.

    Barbara: Nein, das geht leider nicht.

  19. OverflooD am 24. März 2007 um 12:34 #

    Ich habe gerade bemerkt, dass die Abfrage noch immer Case-Sensitive ist. D.h. wenn ich nach “advanced” suche, finde ich nicht “Advanced”. Ist das anders nicht möglich? Ansonsten super Plugin!

  20. Alex Günsche am 24. März 2007 um 14:02 #

    Das wäre mir (und vermutlich auch den MySQL-Entwicklern) neu. Bitte gib mal einen Link zu einer Beispielergebnisseite.

  21. OverflooD am 25. März 2007 um 16:52 #

    Ok, jetzt nochmal im Kommentarfeld…: auf www.dachrenovierungen.de z.B. kannst du im Glossar “RAL Farben” etc. finden. Nun suche mal links in der Suche nach RAL oder ral: Beides gibt aus: nicht gefunden. War ein Irrtum, dass es case-sensitive ist - es findet es nämlich überhaupt nicht. Woran kann das liegen?

  22. Alex Günsche am 25. März 2007 um 17:48 #

    Der Grund liegt in der MySQL-Konfiguration Deines Servers. Dort wird eine Mindestlänge für Wörter definiert, die in den Index aufgenommen werden. In der erweiterten Beschreibung zum AdvancedSearch-Plugin steht (ziemlich weit unten), wie man diese Konfiguration ändert.

    Wenn Du keinen Zugriff auf die MySQL-Konfiguration Deines Servers hast, musst Du leider mit dieser Einschränkung leben.

  23. Paul Strauss am 28. März 2007 um 20:12 #

    I was going to re-enable this plug in but encountered an odd side effect. When I had it enabled, I was getting not only my articles in my search results, but also links to any associated images that happened to contain those search terms in their titles.

    For instance, if I searched for “XBOX,” I’d see articles with that word in them, but also a list of image titles which linked to the image attachments.

    Any idea why this would happen when your plugin is enabled, and is there a way to turn that off?

  24. frank am 11. April 2007 um 20:47 #

    Hi Alex…
    hast Du die lite-suche mal unter mySQL 5 getestet??
    Irgendwie scheint sie da nicht zu funzen… oder ICH bin bloß wieder mal zu blöd…

  25. Alex Günsche am 11. April 2007 um 21:15 #

    Advanced Search [Lite] funktioniert wunderbar mit MySQL 5. Auf diesem Server läuft ebenfalls MySQL 5, und das Plugin funktioniert einwandfrei.

    Was genau ist denn Dein Problem?

  26. frank am 12. April 2007 um 11:45 #

    hat sich, glaube ich erledigt. Ich hatte eine falsche action in der Suche… mit PHP_SELF tut es…

  27. Lio am 20. April 2007 um 08:03 #

    Hi Alex !

    Again, congratulation for your plugin AdvancedSearch Lite. It offers a real progress to wp weblog interface and it works pretty well, but…

    I noticed that the search with ” (double quote) to search the exact phrase does not return anything and a \ comes in the search area.

    I first thought that my configuration was not good, but I tried on your website http://www.zirona.com/ and the same bug appear.

    Do you know this problem ?

    (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/109188#post-539929)

  28. Tomaz Pipan am 2. Mai 2007 um 12:27 #

    Thank you for a wonderfull search plugin; the highliteing is most apprichiated!

    However, I have most of the text in meta tags and I believe the serach does not search the META DATA! Would that be possible; is there a hack in a code that I can add to enable the searcher to look into meta_value and meta_key tables??

    _thanks
    Tomaz

  29. Frank am 7. Mai 2007 um 12:21 #

    Hi Alex,
    ist es möglich, dass die Suche in der Datenbank auch auf andere Tabellen ausgeweitet wird, etwa auf alt- bzw. titletags in der Datenbanktabelle von myGallery?
    Gruß Frank

  30. OverflooD am 17. Mai 2007 um 14:15 #

    Es ist ziemlich hinderlich, dass das Plugin auch die dazu zugeordneten Dateien - wie Bilder, etc. - findet. Bei der entsprechenden Seite erhalte ich nur eine Fehlerseite. Kannst Du dies einschränken?

  31. Martin am 20. Mai 2007 um 18:13 #

    Has anyone else noticed this peculiar problem? The search doesn’t seem to
    find anything with today’s date.

    Changing the date of the post in the Sql database to yesterday’s date and the item is found on the search.

    Wondering if this is how the search is supposed to work, or??

  32. Martin am 20. Mai 2007 um 18:14 #

    Also tried this on your site and got the same results.
    Pardon the duplicate remarks but had to post to get a current day for the search..

  33. Martin am 31. Mai 2007 um 21:03 #

    Hi Alex:
    Still love your search plugin.
    Had to make one minor change to it for my use though. Don’t know if you want to consider it for the next update or not. I have a large number of posts with attached photos (jpg). About 75%. The search will get 2 hits and list the main post and then list the attachment as a separate post (ie: Post title Paul Jones at Vegas and attachment Paul Jones photo.jpg will both list as hits. The problem comes in that members will post a comment on the attachment, that is not really a post, instead of the main post.

    I made the following change:
    Line 197:
    From: ” AND post_password = ‘’ AND post_status != ‘draft’ “.
    To: ” AND post_password = ‘’ AND post_status != ‘draft’ AND post_status != ‘inherit’ “.

    though I could have just as well checked post_type != ‘attachment’

    Thanks for a great plugin.

  34. Alex Günsche am 31. Mai 2007 um 21:49 #

    Oh, yes… this will be fixed in the next version.

  35. WiBu am 1. Juni 2007 um 04:01 #

    Is there a way to make searches ordered by relevance rather than date using the wp search form?

    I thought this was the default setting but from a few test searches this is not the case.

  36. Silvi am 2. Juni 2007 um 15:04 #

    Hmmm wenn ich alle drei Optionen auf False stelle, dann ist automatisch die Suche nach Datum nicht Relevanz ausgewählt. Wo kann ich das denn umstellen, ich möchte nur eine Minimale Darstellung der Suche, aber wie gesagt nach Relevanz sortiert.

    Ansonsten ein super klasse Plugin, vielen Dank !

    Gruß
    Silvi

  37. Alex Günsche am 3. Juni 2007 um 23:16 #

    WiBu, Silvi,

    change the line

    $asl_sortby = ($_GET['asl_sortby'] == 'relevance') ? 'score ' : 'post_date_gmt ';

    to

    $asl_sortby = ($_GET['asl_sortby'] == 'date') ? 'post_date_gmt ': 'score ';

    That should fix it.

  38. Alex am 8. Juli 2007 um 19:48 #

    Hallo Alex,

    leider klappt das plugin bei mir nicht so richtig, es hat auch den bug, dass es Suchergebnisse nicht von heute findet. Aber es findet auch keine Woerter in posts, pages oder sonst wo, nur im titel. Ich benutze WP 2.2.1

    Waeere dir fuer jede Hilfe dankbar

    Alex

  39. Tom am 8. August 2007 um 18:23 #

    Hi!
    Downloads are corrupted? Zip file contains a strange file not a folder+php!

  40. John Rolf am 12. August 2007 um 20:27 #

    Excellent little ad on, thanks a lot.

    Is there any way to get a report or to see what people have entered in the search box?

    Thanks,
    john rolf

  41. Alex Günsche am 12. August 2007 um 22:25 #

    Hi John, I think there are a couple of plugins that allow you to analyze search terms. Please have a look at wp-plugins.net.

  42. Olaf am 26. September 2007 um 15:56 #

    Hi Alex,
    teste gerad local mal durch was alles so bei einem Upgrade zu WP2.3 nicht läuft. Hab alles hinbekommen bis auf dies Plugin. Wie sieht es bei dir aus, ist es geplant dies anzugehen?

    Fehler ist, das fragt nach der nicht mehr existierenden “präfix_post2cat”

    Vielen Dank, Olaf

  43. Olaf am 26. September 2007 um 16:12 #

    Uups, ich habs raus, bei mir läuft es mit dem
    " INNER JOIN {$wpdb->term_relationships} ON {$wpdb->posts}.ID = {$wpdb->term_relationships}.object_id ".
    in Zeile 198. Checkst du das mal gegen und sagst Bescheid!?

    Vielen Dank ;)

  44. Sergio am 26. September 2007 um 21:13 #

    I’m very sorry to tell you that the plugin doesn’t function with the newest WordPress 2.3.
    Do you think it’ll be possible to have an upgrade?

  45. Alex Günsche am 26. September 2007 um 23:14 #

    Olaf: Ja, ich weiß … Ich habe schon mit der Überarbeitung angefangen, aber es hat sich so viel geändert, dass ich das halbe Plugin umschreiben muss. Daher wird es wohl bis zur nächsten Woche dauern, bis es eine neue Version gibt.

    Sergio: I know that Advanced Search 0.6 doesn’t work with WP 2.3. As there are so many changes in WP 2.3 that I have to recode half the plugin, I ask everybody to have patience for another week until I can release a new version.

  46. jonas am 28. September 2007 um 17:22 #

    hi.

    zunächst mal ein dankeschön für dein tolles plugin.

    folgendes szenario, wo die suche nicht funktioniert:
    habe eine page namens home.php, die auch eigens gestaltet wird.
    suche ich nach einem wort auf dieser page gibt es keine suchtreffer.

    gibt es eine möglichkeit auch nach pages zu suchen, oder sind die gar von den suchergebnissen ausgeschlossen?
    work-around?

  47. Alex Günsche am 28. September 2007 um 18:27 #

    Nein, nur Inhalte, die in der Datenbank stehen.

    Übrigens: Bitte nicht doppelt in verschiedenen Beiträgen denselben Text schreiben.

  48. Elran am 5. Oktober 2007 um 17:58 #

    hi,

    it’s true that the plugin doesn’t work with WP 2.3 -

    nevertheless, i managed to get it to work by commenting out the following line in the file advancedsearch-lite.php:

    // " INNER JOIN {$wpdb->post2cat} ON {$wpdb->posts}.ID = {$wpdb->post2cat}.post_id ".

    the search results seem fine after this minor edit, but i’m sure there is a more elegent way of dealing with the new category calls.. hopefully, there will be an update to this plugin that is fully compatible with the newest version of WP.

    great plugin! by the way..

  49. OverflooD am 6. Oktober 2007 um 18:40 #

    Hi Alex,

    wie sieht es aus mit dem Update für die 2.3er Version? Muss man sich dabei Gedanken um dein Plugin machen, wenn man Wordpress updatet?

    Grüße
    OverflooD

  50. David M. Besonen am 18. Oktober 2007 um 21:15 #

    how is AdvancedSearch Lite different than AdvancedSearch?

  51. David M. Besonen am 18. Oktober 2007 um 21:20 #

    Alex,

    thank you for this plugin.

    On September 26, 2007 at 23:14, Alex Günsche wrote:

    > Sergio: I know that Advanced Search 0.6 doesn’t work with
    > WP 2.3. As there are so many changes in WP 2.3 that I
    > have to recode half the plugin, I ask everybody to have
    > patience for another week until I can release a new version.

    during your recoding could you please implement a work-around that allows for the searching of strings less than four characters in length?

  52. Shira am 8. Dezember 2007 um 19:54 #

    Tom on August 8, 2007 at 18:23 #
    Hi!
    Downloads are corrupted? Zip file contains a strange file not a folder+php!

    Tom, unzip the file before uploading.. that should work…

  53. Christophe Labedan am 22. Dezember 2007 um 17:55 #

    Deadlink? can’t download the files…
    I’m actually using WP 2.03, where could I get the appropriate version of advancedsearch lite please?
    Thanks ;)

  54. Alex Günsche am 23. Dezember 2007 um 15:58 #

    Christophe: Thanks for the hint, the link is fixed now. By the way, you should upgrade to WordPress 2.0.11; 2.0.3 has multiple security vulnerabilities! (Maybe give InstantUpgrade a try?)

  55. Tom Taylor am 4. Januar 2008 um 17:34 #

    Hi,
    I’m trying to use one of your advanced search plugins (I’m using wordpress 2.2.2, so i guess i need either advanced search 0.6 or advanced search lite?)

    i can download the zip files off this site, but when i try and extract them on my computer it complains and says the zip folder is invalid or corrupted….my computer will extract other zip files, so i don’t think it’s a problem at this end…

    can you help? i don’t have a problem to try the tar.gz files, so not sure if they have similar issues

    thanks

  56. Tom Taylor am 4. Januar 2008 um 17:44 #

    PS and if i unzip it with 7zip it creates a new folder containing a file…but it’s not php, javascript or anything i recognise….and if i upload this to my site it doesn’t recognise it as a valid plugin

  57. Louis Kessler am 9. März 2008 um 06:58 #

    Alex:

    I figured out what is wrong with the .zip file. It is double zipped!!

    Download it and unzip it. Open up the folder that’s created. In it is a file named “advancedsearch-lite-0″.

    Change its name to “advancedsearch-lite-0.zip” and then unzip that. You’ll get the folder with the plugin.

    The same is true for the zip of your full version.

  58. Alex Günsche am 9. März 2008 um 15:02 #

    Interesting, but I cannot reproduce it. Which program do you use for unzipping?

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