WordPress Plugin Search part 3
This is my third post about the WordPress plugin search. In the first and second, I complained about the impossibility to find plugins like wp-polls and lazyest-gallery.
It was because the search engine treated the hyphen as a 'NOT' search operator. Go figure, you search for wp-polls and you get everything with 'wp' but NOT polls. Consider the thousands of plugins with names containing hyphens. Otto, one of the developers on WordPress.org promised to work on it, and he Did! The hyphen is no longer treated as 'NOT'. The search is better than ever! Thank you very much Otto!
WordPress Plugin search greatly improved (not)
About a week ago I complained about the search functionality in the WordPress plugin directory. Today, Ozh Richard @ozh tweeted:
2011 wish list: a search on wp.org/extend/plugins that doesn't suck donkeys asses.
actually, I improved the plugin search a while back by enabling some sphinx features. However, it got broken today..
Searching for a plugin? Use Google
Today I wanted to download the plugin WP-Polls from the WordPress Plugin Directory. I did, what I think any visitor to the directory would do, enter the name of the plugin WP‑Polls in the Search Plugins box. WP-Polls is quite a popular plugin, so I had expected to see a result at the top of the first page. How stupid to expect such a result. WP-Polls is nowhere in the first 20 of 67 pages of results.
Searching for lazyest‑gallery yields one result: The Lazyest Stylesheet plugin.....
Google places WP-Polls right at the top of the results.
IMO, It's time wordpress.org ditches the native searchbar and put a Google searchbar in place.
Exciting new features in Lazyest Gallery 1.0 beta2
Lazyest Gallery 1.0 is feature ready. Some exciting new functions have been added compared to version 0.16.x
- Flash uploader for images
- Move and copy images between folders without losing captions, descriptions or comments
- Simply move images to top of bottom of a list with many images
- More HTML code allowed in descriptions (a, br, strong, em );
- Image and folder dates are preserved and do no longer change when the file system date changes
- Lazyest Gallery can be included in WordPress search results
- Sort automatically ascending or descending by date, filename, caption or description
- A drag handle has been added to the table rows for manually sorting
Please download and test this version and tell me about your experiences
We are running Lazyest Gallery 1.0-rc3
Update: Release candidate 3 is out now!
Release candidate 3 is ready ready for download at the WordPress plugin directory. We have enough confidence to run this version here. Try the new search feture by searching for e.g folder in the search bar. You'll see the gallery search results appended to the WordPress search results.
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