Premium 2.3.0 / Free 4.2.0

As suggested by the version numbering, versions 2.3.0 and 4.2.0 are major updates that change some of Relevanssi behaviour. Nothing should break, however, so updating from earlier versions is safe.

There are lots of changes in this version, so now – and in future release notes – let’s look at them split down into different sections.

Premium 2.3.0 – Known bugs

There’s a bug in version 2.3.0. If you’re on a multisite and Relevanssi Premium is only active on one site, it looks like you can’t save the API key from Relevanssi settings overview page. It does work: Relevanssi does save the key, it just looks like Relevanssi won’t save it.

This will be fixed in the next version, but meanwhile, go save the API key in the Relevanssi Premium network settings. That will get you rid of the problem, and it will also make sure you will get the next version. Setting the one-site API key is not enough to get the updates in version 2.3.0!

New features

• Premium only: Content stopwords are just like regular stopwords, but they are only applied to post content. They are not applied to titles, custom fields or other places.
• New feature: The search form shortcode has a new parameter dropdown which can be used to add a category dropdown, like this: searchform dropdown='category'.
• Premium only: New feature: Related posts can now be used in a different way. Instead of storing rendered HTML in the transients, Relevanssi can now store just the post objects for the related posts.
• Premium only: New feature: Related posts WP CLI command has new parameters: just_objects activates the post object transients, post_type only generates the related posts for a particular post type.
• Premium only: New feature: You can now pin and unpin posts from the Admin search. Just do a search and you can then easily pin posts for that search term.
• New feature: Relevanssi can now use the contents of the PDF files indexed with WP File Download.
• New feature: Relevanssi now supports User Access Manager permission controls.

Filters

• New filter: relevanssi_indexing_tokens can be used to filter the tokens (individual words) before they are indexed.
• Removed filter: relevanssi_default_meta_query_relation did not have any effect anymore.

Changed behaviour

• The default taxonomy relation was set to AND in 2.2.5 / 4.1.4, but wasn’t properly applied before. Now it is really switched.
• Premium only: Relevanssi now uses the relevanssi_indexing_tokens filter hook to add synonyms, which means adding lots of synonyms is much faster than before, and synonyms are now applied to all indexed content.
• New post types have been added to list of forbidden post types Relevanssi won’t show as indexing options (ACF, TablePress and WooCommerce).
• Premium only: Related posts templates are no longer generated when posts are saved. There are cases where generating the templates in admin context cause problems. The templates will be generated the first time the post is opened.

Bug fixes

• Major fix: Tax query processing has been completely refactored, eliminating all sorts of bugs, especially with various edge cases.
• Major fix: Gutenberg block indexing only worked with the Gutenberg plugin enabled. It now works with WP 5.0 built-in Gutenberg as well. If you use Gutenberg blocks, reindex to get all the block content in the index.
• Major fix: Excerpt-building and highlighting did not respect the ‘Keyword matching’ setting. They do now, and the excerpts should be better now.
• Major fix: AND searches needed queries that could get too long for the database to handle. This has been fixed and optimized.
• Major fix: (Premium only) Post exclusion (negative pinning) didn’t work properly in multisite context.
• Major fix: Taxonomy term subquery relations didn’t work; now they are applied.
• Major fix: (Premium only) Saving related posts exclusion settings wasn’t possible.
• Minor fix: Authors can search for their own private posts.
• Minor fix: (Premium only) API key setting field behaviour has been improved.
• Minor fix: iOS uses curly quotes by default, and that didn’t work as a phrase operator. Now phrase operator works with curly quotes and straight quotes.
• Minor fix: The free version Did you mean broke with search terms longer than 255 characters.
• Minor fix: (Premium only) Relevanssi won’t create empty pinning meta fields anymore.
• Minor fix: Phrases with numbers and one word like ‘team 17’ didn’t work, because numbers weren’t counted as words.
• Minor fix: (Premium only) $post->relevanssi_pinned wasn’t set correctly for pinned posts.
• Minor fix: (Premium only) Relevanssi handles errors better in multisite searching when you search for a taxonomy that doesn’t exist on the current site.

Both versions are already out. Premium is available on the Download page and through the WordPress automatic updates, the free version can be downloaded from the plugin repository or with the automatic updates.