What’s the best plugin for searching across all WordPress MultiSite blogs?
September 7th, 2010 by Dan YorkTweet
After writing about how you could search across all the blogs on our WordPress MU site, the post received a comment with a question from another WPMU site administrator asking how we did it.
Since I’d honestly forgotten the details since the site-wide search was set up almost three years ago, I logged into the server and looked. The answer is that we currently use “GT Search all Blogs” by Giovanni Tufo:
/* Plugin Name: GT Search all Blogs Plugin URI: Description: Search in all Blogs, Posts, Pages(both in the title and in the post), based on "WordPress MU Recent Posts" by Ron Rennik Version: 0.2 Author: Giovanni Tufo Author URI: http://joevanni99.wordpress.com */
However, it looks like I have a problem… that plugin seems to be NO LONGER MAINTAINED.
The web page referenced is no longer online, the plugin isn’t listed in the WordPress plugin directory, and while I did find the author’s current website it is in Italian and I couldn’t find anything referencing WordPress.
Which, to me, means that I get to add yet another action to my “to do” list:
Find a new “search all blogs” plugin.
Now, what I have works, obviously, (and works well!) but as WordPress continues to evolve and change I’m not really comfortable using plugins that aren’t also tracking the development of WordPress. At some point in the future, this plugin may stop working… and then it’s up to me to fix it.
In looking through the Plugin Directory, this MultiSite Global Search plugin looks pretty good:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multisite-global-search/
My one concern that I don’t see listed in the plugin info is whether or not it only searches public blogs on the site. I would hope that is the case, and if it doesn’t is probably a minor modification. (I have a number of “private” blogs on the site that are for experimentation and testing… but I don’t want those posts showing up in search results.)
Unfortunately, I don’t really seem to find any other “global search” or “search all blogs” plugins in the plugin directory.
What are other people using out there?
Related posts:
- Update – Status of “GT Search all Blogs” plugin for WordPress MU
- The WordPress MU plugin I want: site-wide trends in blog posts, comments, etc. across ALL blogs
- What is the best Twitter plugin for WordPress MU?
- WPMU mu-plugin to list most recent posts across all blogs coming soon…
- Promoting relevant content through the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
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September 7th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Answer: not much.
Question tho: if that plugin is no longer maintained, why not pick up the torch? or find someone to adopt it?
September 7th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Andrea,
Dang! I was hoping someone out there had something else that worked well/better
Yes, I did consider / am considering either directly maintaining the plugin or finding someone. I fired an email to the plugin author to see if he would be open to that.
Thanks as always for weighing in, Dan
November 5th, 2010 at 10:31 am
I’m experimenting with this one:
http://welcome.totheinter.net/wpsearchmu/
It is a branch of the wpSearch plugin. So far, it works really well with wordpress 3 and multisite enabled (I use subdirectories). Just follow the basic instructions. You have to install in wp-content> mu-plugins directory and enable the options for each blog. The relevance of the results is much better, paging works and not found messages also.
Sofar I have 2 problems with it: - I cannot find a way to exclude certain pages/posts from the results. - I cannot find a way to exclude custom post types from the results
November 5th, 2010 at 12:59 pm
I solved the filtering:
http://welcome.totheinter.net/wpsearchmu/comment-page-5/#comment-15349
Now I have a perfect and simple solution for searching across multisite wordpress blogs.
Hope this helps someone!
November 18th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Very cool, Remco! Thanks for passing along your solution!