Introduction

1. Introduction

WP Fast Total Search (WPFTS) is a powerful WordPress plugin that significantly enhances the default search functionality. It provides users with fast and relevant search results across all site content, including posts, pages, custom post types, meta data, taxonomies, and even shortcode content. Unlike the standard WordPress search, WPFTS utilizes an indexing approach, which drastically speeds up the search process, especially on sites with a large volume of content.

Key Features of WPFTS

  • Indexed Search: WPFTS creates an index of words and their locations within the site’s content, enabling fast retrieval of relevant results.

  • Search Across Various Data Types: The plugin supports searching through titles, content, excerpts, meta fields, taxonomies, and shortcodes.

  • Relevance Tuning: You can adjust the weights of different data clusters (e.g., title, content, meta fields) to influence the relevance of search results.

  • Smart Excerpts: WPFTS generates “smart excerpts” that contain the found keywords in context, helping users quickly assess the relevance of results.

  • Multilingual Support: The plugin supports morphological analysis for many languages, allowing it to find results even when different word forms are used.

  • Extensibility: WPFTS provides developers with a rich set of hooks (actions and filters) to extend the plugin’s functionality and integrate with other plugins and themes.

  • Live Search Widget: The plugin includes an autocomplete widget that helps users find information faster.

  • Query Logging: WPFTS can log search queries, allowing you to analyze popular searches and optimize site content.

  • Indexing Rules: Developers can create flexible indexing rules to define which data should be indexed and how it should be processed.

Why Use WPFTS for Extension Development?

WPFTS provides developers with a powerful and flexible API for extending search functionality. Using WPFTS hooks and filters, you can:

  • Integrate your plugins and themes with WPFTS search.

  • Add data from any source to the index.

  • Modify the search and ranking algorithm.

  • Customize the display of search results.

  • Create your own search widgets.

Target Audience

This documentation is intended for WordPress developers who want to extend the functionality of WP Fast Total Search or integrate it with their plugins and themes. It assumes the reader is familiar with the basics of PHP, MySQL, and the WordPress API.

Documentation Structure

In the following sections, we will cover:

  • The plugin installation and activation process.

  • Basic WPFTS configuration.

  • Plugin architecture and database structure.

  • A detailed description of all hooks and filters provided by the plugin.

  • Examples of using the API for extension development.

  • Information about feedback and support.

Let’s get started!

Installation and Activation