Early this week we launched a new version of geeSearch Plus (former gSearch Plus) plugin. The main driver for version 1.2.0 was to prepare it to become something bigger (what?! more on this later). So, it wasn’t only another bug-correction-revision. Shortly, it was about naming and a new search relevance engine.
A g that becomes gee?
Gee… Where should I start… I’ve joined GOMO in full-time mode a little more than a year ago. One of the GOMO’s goals set by then was to make the difference in the WordPress environment, with well designed and well coded themes and plugins. Since then we’ve tried to level up our skills to deliver our customer’s projects always according to the best HTML5 & CSS3 practices, and WordPress/PHP standards. This is a daily battle, to read, to investigate, to experiment, to learn and put in practice only the best (I’m sure you all go through the same!)
In this quest, GOMO launched recently a new (ad)venture in the WordPress economy: geeThemes, a new premium themes & plugins label which soon will launch beautiful goods in the WordPress ecosystem.
So it was natural that as gSearch Plus is having a really nice acceptance in the .org repo we decided to migrate it to geeThemes portfolio. Naturally, it was renamed to be part of the gee family. And, don’t worry, the geeSearch Plus plugin will continue to evolve and be available for free at WordPress.org, with our best effort support, as a way of giving back to the community.
What’s up with 1.2.0 ?
With almost 2.500 downloads so far, some bugs’ reports and some nice performance tests (props to Li-An) against one of the most known search plugins, I was compelled to dive into a full revision on the plugin core files, mainly:
- Global functions, classes and hooks were renamed to gee-style
- Introduced new filters’ hooks to allow power users to customise certain behaviours
- Corrected a major bug that was affecting the wp_title() function and potentially creating issues on other plugins
- and, last and most important, a completely new relevance engine, to make the search results order from the most relevant to the least one.
During the revision, there were some internal discussions on what should be configurable on the admin settings page (like relevance weights) and what shouldn’t, but in the end, we really like to keep the plugin very simple and easy to setup, leaving some degrees of customisation into more advanced users, using hooks.
And, as before, it’s the journey that matters so during the final tests, I’ve bumped into some potential issues in certain environments which made me design a completely new approach for the plugin’s core functions… so, expect a revision in a near future!