Need troubleshooting suggestions

I added print statements so that shortcodes.php would run certain info to a file. It appears to be generating a search string, but the database query isn’t returning results.

Here is an example:

These are the contents of $request. I know for a fact that a blog contains the term “buttons”.

SELECT wp_v_posts.* from wp_v_posts left join wp_users on wp_users.ID=wp_v_posts.post_author where ( post_title LIKE ‘%buttons%’ OR post_content LIKE ‘%buttons%’ OR wp_users.display_name LIKE ‘%buttons%’ ) AND ( post_status = ‘publish’ OR post_status = ‘private’ ) AND ( post_type = ‘post’ OR post_type = ‘page’ ) ORDER BY wp_v_posts.blog_id ASC, wp_v_posts.post_date DESC, wp_v_posts.comment_count DESC

Here are the contents of $search
Array
(
)

Here is the site where searching locally returns a result, but searching globally does not:

https://dev.glycam.org/docs/help/
(the site is still under construction, so I am a bit shy about sharing, but perhaps it will help)

Completely by accident, I found that the multisite search was working for some blogs but not others (not the ones I had previously been testing). I tried setting privacy settings the same, but that didn’t matter. I tried comparing the site “Settings” tabs, and there were differences, but none that I knew enough about to know they would make a difference.

Happily, and surprisingly, I found a behavior that seems to have fixed things. It might also help someone who knows more about WordPress than I do to figure out what happened.

Here’s what magically seems to have changed things:

1. Rename a non-searchable blog to a new name.

Example: The blog currently at https://dev.glycam.org/docs/oldhelp used to be at https://dev.glycam.org/docs/help — until I renamed it. It used to be that global-searching for terms on that site wouldn’t work.

2. Create a new blog with the old name.

Example: I then created a new blog at https://dev.glycam.org/docs/help and added some of the posts from the one that was renamed to oldhelp.

3. Amazingly, multisite global search works again, for both sites.

More info: I repeated these steps for one blog on our private site, and, I was able to get search results from other blogs in addition to the one I renamed. Before the procedure above, for example, only one blog would return one result from “search term”. Now, there are five results, from five different blogs, one of which is the blog I performed the procedure on.

Any ideas what that procedure might have affected?

Although the procedure can make more blogs visible than were, it doesn’t necessarily make *all* blogs visible. Furthermore, one blog lost all its posts when I tried it just now. I had a backup — make a database dump before trying the procedure above!!!.

So… I think somehow the blogs just aren’t being seen, or aren’t being seen as valid, when the global search happens. I’m not sure how to fix that, though.

I did find one workaround for at least one manifestation of the problem.

Briefly:

1. For each blog that isn’t showing up, make sure the “Public” Attribute is checked in the Info tab you access from Network Admin via “Sites” and “Edit”.
2. Network Deactivate the plugin, then Network Activate it.

More info, including why:

As has been mentioned elsewhere in relevant forums, the “Attributes” part of the Site Info can have all boxes un-checked (without admins having done anything). This can cause the $wpdb calls in inc/views.php to ignore those blogs because “AND public = ‘1’” will not be satisfied. Even if you check the “Public” box, the plugin will not see that blog because – best I can tell – the information for public blogs doesn’t get updated unless the blog is new (see multisite-global-search.php, particularly the second argument to register_activation_hook). So, if you network deactivate, that forces the plugin to forget previous knowledge of the blogs. Then, when you activate again, it re-discovers them.

As a fix, I think it might work to give an option “refresh blog info for multisite global search” that does essentially the same thing. I would suggest code, but I really don’t know php, so I can’t do that very well.