[Plugin: Dave's WordPress Live Search] Announcing "Dave's WordPress Live Search v2.0&

Announcing Dave’s WordPress Live Search v2.0

I was startled this afternoon when I upgraded a site of mine to the newly-released WordPress 3.1 “Reinhardt”, and Dave’s WordPress Live Search stopped working.

When I got home, I started working on a solution but it didn’t feel right. It was an ugly hack just to make it work with the new WordPress when I had a mostly-functional Dave’s WordPress Live Search 2.0 almost ready. Why not finish that instead?

So, I pulled an all-nighter to get Dave’s WordPress Live Search out the door. It has some exciting new features that should improve performance, compatibility, and reliability:

* It uses WordPress’s AJAX hooks instead of figuring out where it is and running a custom bootstrap every AJAX call.

* The dynamically-generated Javascript file is replaced with a static Javascript file that can be cached & minified, plus a short configuration script is injected into the page header.

* When anonymous users search your site, their search results are cached. When more anonymous users enter the same search terms, the cached results are returned instead of doing the search over again. The cache expires after 3600 seconds (1 hour) by default but that can be changed in the admin settings.

* I added an optional “debug” tab to the admin settings. Right now it just dumps out the contents of the cache, but more things will be added in the future. This should make troubleshooting users’ issues easier for me.

* Best of all: WordPress 3.1 compatibility.

Unfortunately, some changes had to be delayed in order to get this one released. Most notably, I received an offer to translate this plugin into German, and I intend to take the translator up on it. It would be wonderful to have this plugin available to more people in their native language. But that’s probably going to wait until 2.1 or 2.2.

Big thanks to my wife, @justphoenix, who was very patient while I finished this tonight. Shout outs to @macrumors for keeping me entertained on the eve of some new Macbook Pros coming out, and @honeymoderncafe for just being awesome.

Also, thank you everyone who has submitted patches, detailed bug reports, and words of encouragement.

Good night everyone. If something breaks, send me an email at [email protected] with some details and I’ll see if I can’t figure out what’s up. Until then, I’ll be dreaming of shiny new Apple hardware, a spiffy new WordPress release, and of course @justphoenix.

– Dave