The main reason to release this new version is to fix a major problem with WordPress 4.9 compatibility. I strongly recommend moving on to WordPress 5 (and Classic Editor, if necessary), but this version removes the problem.

Since there were couple of changes in Relevanssi behaviour included as well, this is a minor update and not just a patch.

Known issues

• Posts can be excluded from related posts without a reason. Gutenberg saves the _relevanssi_related_not_related custom field even when it’s empty, and the empty field is enough to trigger the exclusion. As a fix, you can remove rows with meta_key of _relevanssi_related_not_related and empty meta_value from the wp_postmeta database table.

Changed behaviour

• Content stopwords are now applied to the attachment content. Previously they weren’t, as the attachment content is stored in a custom field and not in the post content. However, it makes sense to consider that post content as well, and that’s what Relevanssi now does.
• Phrases in OR search are now less restrictive. A search for foo "bar baz" used to only return posts with the "bar baz" phrase, but now also posts with just the word foo will be returned. I feel this makes the OR search with phrases behave more like it should.

Major fixes

• Running Relevanssi Premium version 2.6.1 on WordPress 4.9 caused problems, because a function was called that is only defined when Gutenberg is available. The function call is now also only made when Gutenberg is available.

Minor fixes

• Relevanssi included results from archived blogs in the multisite search results. Turns out archived blogs are considered public. Now Relevanssi blocks archived blogs like it does spam or deleted blogs.
• User Access Manager showed drafts in search results for all users. Relevanssi permission checking for UAM is now only applied to public posts, removing this problem.

The free version is available from the WordPress plugin repository. You can get the Premium version from the Download page or with the automatic update.

The download page shows two different versions of the plugin available. The basic version no longer includes tests or anything else you won’t need when actually using the plugin. The developer version includes tests and all sorts of other tooling you may find interesting if you’re a developer.