Premium 2.11 / Free 4.9

It’s been a while since the previous version, and the list of features and bug fixes in this version has grown long. This version includes several interesting new features, both for free and Premium.

Free version users get access to better debugging tools. There’s now a Debugging tab in the Relevanssi settings, which lets you see how Relevanssi sees your posts. This has been available for Premium users (and still is) on the individual post edit pages, but Premium users may also find this new interface useful.

Premium users will perhaps find the new possibility to create multiple excerpts from one post helpful. You can now have Relevanssi create as many excerpts as you wish from your posts. This can be quite useful if you have a site with long articles. See our knowledge base entry on multiple excerpts.

Known issues

• Any relevanssi_indexing_restriction filters – including the “Index image attachments” setting, when it’s disabled – do not work on newly added posts. So, even if you have “Index image attachments” disabled, images that are added will be indexed. Rebuilding the index will get the correct results. For a quick fix, add this to your site: add_action( 'add_attachment', 'relevanssi_insert_edit', 12 ); (but remember to remove it when the next version is released).
• Searching for words that end in “s” can cause slightly broken highlighting. The easiest fix for this is to enable the “Expand highlights to cover full words” setting.
• The “Post exclusion” setting does not work correctly at the moment. Premium users shouldn’t use it anyway; use the “Exclude this post” option from the post edit pages.

2.11.1

• Changed behaviour: The relevanssi_excerpt_part filter hook now gets the post ID as a second parameter. The documentation for the filter has been fixed to match actual use: this filter is applied to the excerpt part after the highlighting and the ellipsis have been added.
• Changed behaviour: The relevanssi_index_custom_fields filter hook is no longer used when determining which custom fields are used for phrase searching. If you have a use case where this change matters, please contact us.
• Minor fix: The relevanssi_excerpt filter hook was removed in 2.11.0. It is now restored and behaves the way it did before, except that when doing multi-part excerpts, this filter is applied separately for each excerpt part.
• Minor fix: The debugging tab no longer shows the ‘Buy Premium’ note to Premium users.
• Minor fix: Avoids undefined variable warnings from the Pretty Links compatibility code.
• (Premium) Minor fix: In Premium, phrase matching in custom fields didn’t work correctly when the custom field indexing setting was ‘all’ or ‘visible’.
• Minor fix: The Oxygen Builder compatibility has been improved. Now shortcodes in Oxygen Builder content are expanded, if that setting is enabled in Relevanssi settings.
• (Premium) Minor fix: Adding new redirects when there were none was impossible. This is now fixed, and in a more future-proof way.
• (Premium) Minor fix: The default value for the number of excerpts was 3. It’s now 1.

New features

• There’s now a “Debugging” tab in the Relevanssi settings, letting you see how the Relevanssi index sees posts. This is familiar to Premium users, but is now available in the free version as well.
• The SEO Framework plugin is now supported and posts set excluded from the search in SEO Framework settings will be excluded from the index.
• There’s a new option, “Expand highlights”. Enabling it makes Relevanssi expand partial-word highlights to cover the full word. This is useful when doing partial matching and when using a stemmer.
• (Premium) Relevanssi can now generate excerpts that show multiple snippets from the post. You can adjust the number of excerpts displayed from the excerpt settings. Individual excerpt parts are wrapped in span tags with the class excerpt_part for styling.
• New filter hook relevanssi_excerpt_part allows you to modify the excerpt parts before they are combined together.
• (Premium) New filter hook relevanssi_excerpts lets you filter the array of excerpts before the highlights are added.
• (Premium) Relevanssi now supports an arbitrary number of levels in the field_%_subfield_%_subfield notation for flexible ACF fields.
• Improved compatibility with Oxygen Builder. Relevanssi automatically indexes the Oxygen Builder content and cleans it up. New filter hooks relevanssi_oxygen_section_filters and relevanssi_oxygen_section_content allow easier filtering of Oxygen content to eg. remove unwanted sections.

Changed behaviour

• The “Uncheck this for non-ASCII highlights” option has been removed. Highlights are now done in a slightly different way that should work in all cases, including for example Cyrillic text, thus this option is no longer necessary.
• (Premium) The index_pdfs WP CLI command has been retired. It has been replaced with two separate commands: remove_attachment_contents removes all read attachment contents from the database and read_attachments reads all attachment content from files that haven’t been read yet.
• Relevanssi excerpts are now wrapped in span tags.
• The relevanssi_excerpt filter hook has been removed. It’s replaced by relevanssi_excerpt_part and relevanssi_excerpts.

Minor fixes

• (Premium) Removes the warning about non-numeric values when using a redirect for the first time.
• Fixes phrase searching using non-US alphabet.
• (Premium) Sometimes the relevanssi_user_index_ok filter would get a user ID and not the object. This is now fixed: it’s always an object.
• (Premium) Excluding posts from the block editor didn’t work properly: the post would be marked excluded, but would not actually be removed from the index until the next reindexing of the whole database. This works now as expected.
• Relevanssi would break admin searching for hierarchical post types. This is now fixed, Relevanssi won’t do that anymore.
• Relevanssi indexing now survives better shortcodes that change the global $post.
• Warnings about missing relevanssi_update_counts function are now removed.
• Paid Membership Pro support now takes notice of the “filter queries” setting.
• OR logic didn’t work correctly when two phrases both had the same word (for example “freedom of speech” and “free speech”). The search would always be an AND search in those cases. That has been fixed.
• Relevanssi no longer blocks the Pretty Links admin page search.
• The “Respect ‘exclude_from_search'” setting did not work if no post type parameter was included in the search parameters.
• The category inclusion and exclusion setting checkboxes on the Searching tab didn’t work. The setting was saved, but the checkboxes wouldn’t appear.

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 tooling you may find interesting if you’re a developer.