Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

WordPress.org Search

Apple, Google, Software, Web Standards, WordPress

I’ve ripped out the guts and redone the search on the WordPress.org support forums in the hopes of making it something more people will use. Try it out! The new system searches the wiki (hosted on a different machine), thread titles, recent posts, and does a FULLTEXT post search for the most relevant posts. It has contextual search highlighting (like Google).

When I have some time to get back to this every section will have a “more of this” link to take you to more results (paged). It does this currently with the wiki search, counting the total results and linking to the wiki search directly if there are more than 5 results. Probably still a few bugs to work out. The fulltext query was taking over two seconds to run until I tweaked the JOIN type to get the MySQL optimizer to use the proper index and join order. Everything should validate as XHTML.

A new system is also in place to inject custom results at the top of the page. We’ve been logging searches for the last few months (over a 129,000 so far, about 43,000 unique searches) and I’m going to be working closely with the documentation team to identify which searches are most common and what tailored information would be best to present the user with when they search for targetted terms, be it a blog post, an external resource, someplace on WordPress.org itself, a wiki page, or a specific thread. We can watch trends and spikes in searches to identify any problems in the application itself or features that may be insufficently documented or hard to use.

The work is far from finished, but I think it’s a strong first step into fully integrating search as a support mechanism and bringing the WordPress team even closer to the pulse of the users.

Tramadol Attack

Spam, WordPress

Just had a spam attack, about 90 comments over the course of two hours I was away from the computer. Not a single one is visible because every one was caught by my filter. How to delete them all? Comments Mass edit mode → Search for IP → Check all → Delete checked. Basically less than five clicks to delete 90 comments. The search could have keyed on any part of the name, email, or comment. It took longer to write this sentence than it took to delete two hours of spammers work. This isn’t a new 1.3 feature, this has been in WordPress for months.

Sourceforge Woes

WordPress

Sourceforge seems to have borked parts of the WordPress CVS repository, replacing files with files from other projects. Needless to say, this makes the CVS a little more bleeding edge than normal. Looking into this now. Might be a good opportunity to move this last critical bit off Sourceforge and switch to Subversion.

Salon Article

WordPress

Blogging grows up, not as interesting as it could have been, but a good overview of Six Apart. When I talked to Farhod about two weeks ago I estimated around 15k WordPress blogs. Today the WP blog crawler has over 18,000 in its database. Six months ago the list was small enough to list every WordPress blog on the counter page. Nine months ago you could count the number of WP blogs on your hands. Since I started writing this entry 82 people have downloaded WordPress for free. It’s not where we’re at, it’s where we’re going.