Relevanssi 4.0

Relevanssi 4.0 has completely redone the settings page. It has been rewritten and split into tabs, to make everything easier to access, understand and use. The indexing procedure is now much smoother, with no need for babysitting and repeated clicks of “Continue indexing” to index a large database. Just click “Build index” once, and that’s it – and you’ll even get an estimate of how long the process will take.

Since Relevanssi follows semantic version numbering, this means the 4.0 is a big change from 3. x and full backwards compatibility is not promised. For starters, some legacy code has been removed, and a smooth upgrade process is not promised other than the latest 3.x versions; anything above 3.5 should be fine, but if you’re running an older version, either upgrade first to 3.6.x or remove Relevanssi completely and install 4.0 from scratch. If you have lots of customizations, it’s recommended to first update to 4.0 on a staging site to see that everything works as expected. 4.0 has been tested more than any Relevanssi version before, but it’s always possible something unexpected will happen.

After you update to 4.0, deactivate the plugin and reactivate it, in order to have the database structure changes take effect.

Here’s the changelog for 4.0:

• Legacy code has been removed. If you have a version older than 3.6, update first to 3.6.2.2 to guarantee smooth upgrade process.
• This version includes a small database change, so if you’re updating from a previous version, after the update deactivate the plugin and then reactivate.
• Improved indexing: no more clicking “Continue indexing” again and again!
• Settings pages have been completely rewritten.
• There’s documentation in the WordPress contextual help: just click Help on the top right corner.
• Better Polylang support. A new option to remove the Polylang language filter.
• Logs can be automatically trimmed. Old log entries are removed to save space.
• Finally a setting to adjust content weight!
• Excerpts can use the custom field content.
• Highlighting in documents is changed: it now requires a highlight query parameter. This helps getting pass caching and makes the highlighting more reliable. To get the query parameter active, use relevanssi_get_permalink() to print out the permalinks on the search results templates.
• Relevanssi added synonyms to highlighting even if synonyms were not used for searching. In some cases, synonyms were added twice.
• The User Searches page got a makeover, too.
• Relevanssi is automatically disabled in REST API searches.
• Groups and Simple Membership support has been improved.
• Sorting search results is now up to 300 times faster than before.
• Lots of improvements all over the place.
• New filter: relevanssi_excerpt_custom_field_content lets you modify custom field content that is used for excerpts.
• New filter: relevanssi_punctuation_filter allows for easy modification of punctuation handling.
• New filter: relevanssi_default_punctuation_replacement changes the default way to handle the rest of the punctuation.
• New filter: relevanssi_search_again lets you run the search again if no results are found and to modify the parameters between search runs.
• New filter: relevanssi_fallback allows you to do fallback searches.
• New filter: relevanssi_page_builder_shortcodes lets you control which page builder shortcodes Relevanssi removes before building the excerpts.
• New filter: relevanssi_optimize_excerpts makes excerpt-building faster, if you make the filter return true.