The WordPress Club Spectacu.la (So, do you love clever domain related names or not so much? – editor.) is working on a WordPress search plugin that they believe will be superior to WordPress’ own search feature.
“Within a few days or so, we’ll have finished the coding and unit testing of an improved WordPress search tool. Its aim isn’t to provide an advanced search tool, as offered elsewhere. It doesn’t let you search within categories, or by tag. It doesn’t offer a site visitor anything other than the normal WP search.
So, the plugin will shortly be ready for beta testing. And we’d like to offer to send it to ten testers who can try it out on sites that they back up regularly and who understand that this plugin will do several things.”
If you’re interested in becoming a tester, the details are listed after the break. But hurry, there are only ten spots, nine if you count mine. :-) Click Here to Apply.
1. Your indexes on wp-posts will grow dramatically, potentially becoming larger than the table’s contents.
2. Some low-cost or poor quality hosting may not work well with this, especially if the DB server is cranky or slow. The plugin does its best to mitigate on that.
3. On very, very large sites with tens of thousands of posts, the indexing could take some time – during that period search results could be cranky and your site may slow down.
4. The plugin schedules an overnight optimize to keep the database in check. We can guess that on certain sites you may not want that, so be aware of this.
5. The load on your database of a search should drop dramatically.
6. You should also understand that it’s beta code – it might have issues and you do use it at your own risk.
If you’d like to test, simply leave a comment, leaving your e-mail address. When the plugin is ready, we’ll then send you a copy. We then ask that you try the plugin on your site and answer some questions that we will add to this post later.
Source: Spectacu.la
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