Hello all! I am a main developer and support of the Wordpress Fulltext Search plugin. I will be glad to help you if you have any questions or issues with the plugin. Just let me know!
Do you mean a number of the relevant words for each search result item or a total of posts found?
If you need only the number of found posts, you can use WP_Query's property found_posts.
$wp_query->found_posts;
I didn't test this, but it should work.
Recently we faced a great plugin to display PDF files in a fancy way - like a paper magazine! It's the Real3D Flipbook plugin, which is awesome! However it also has the same problem - users are not possible to search PDF documents uploaded to the Real3D FlipBook by the content.
Fortunately, it is also simple to fix with the WPFTS Pro.
add_filter('wpfts_index_post', function($index, $p)
{
global $wpdb, $wpfts_core;
if (in_array($p->post_type, array('post', 'page'))) {
global $post;
if (preg_match_all('~[real3dflipbook((\s+[^]]*)|(]))]~sU', $p->post_content, $zz, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE)) {
// 1 is a shortcode params
// 0 is a whole shortcode tag
require_once $wpfts_core->root_dir.'/includes/wpfts_utils.class.php';
$sum = '';
foreach ($zz[1] as $k => $d) {
if (isset($d[0])) {
$zz2 = array();
if (preg_match('~id=[\x22\x27]?(\d+)~', $d[0], $zz2)) {
$bookid = $zz2[1];
// Look for data
$ff = get_option('real3dflipbook_'.$bookid);
if ($ff && (is_array($ff))) {
if (isset($ff['pdfUrl'])) {
$url = trim($ff['pdfUrl']);
if (strlen($url) > 0) {
$ret = WPFTS_Utils::GetCachedFileContent_ByLocalLink($url);
$sum .= (isset($ret['post_content']) ? trim($ret['post_content']) : '').' ';
}
}
}
}
}
}
$index['real3dflipbook_content'] .= $sum;
/*
$content = $p->post_content;
// Remove the pdfviewer shortcodes
for ($ii = count($zz[0]) - 1; $ii >= 0; $ii --) {
$content = substr($content, 0, $zz[0][$ii][1]).substr($content, $zz[0][$ii][1] + strlen($zz[0][$ii][0]));
}
$index['post_content'] = $content;
*/
global $shortcode_tags;
$removed_tmp = array();
$shortcode_list = array('real3dflipbook');
foreach ($shortcode_list as $dd) {
if (isset($shortcode_tags[$dd])) {
$removed_tmp[$dd] = $shortcode_tags[$dd]; // Save shortcode function
unset($shortcode_tags[$dd]);
} else {
$removed_tmp[$dd] = false;
}
add_shortcode($dd, function(){ return ''; }); // Dummy function to render empty string for shortcode
}
$post = get_post($p->ID);
setup_postdata($post);
ob_start();
the_content();
$r = ob_get_clean();
$r = strip_tags(str_replace('<', ' <', $r));
// Okay, we need to restore shortcodes
foreach ($removed_tmp as $k => $d) {
if ($d) {
$shortcode_tags[$k] = $removed_tmp[$k];
} else {
unset($shortcode_tags[$k]);
}
}
wp_reset_postdata();
$index['post_content'] = $r;
}
}
return $index;
}, 3, 2);
Well, the code is not that simple, but if you just want to have it works,
download the ready addon!
https://fulltextsearch.org/wpfts-addon-real3dflipbook-1.0.0.zip
Once purchased, the system should send you a couple of letters from the store. There you will see the bill report and also the license key.
If you didn't get a letter, please check your spambox. Also, you can find your license key on your account page at https://fulltextsearch.org/my-account/.
If you still have issues with it, please put a message in the Live Chat on the fulltextsearch.org main page. Thanks!
Hi @Nick
I just made a short check for Google Search results' appearance and I found that they are trying to extend the excerpt by other (not "good") sentences even there is only one "good" sentence and it's short (your case #1).
So yes, I think it would be a great idea to add one or two other sentences near the result to give more context information to the user.
At the same time, I know that some developers still want to keep excerpts as short as possible to keep more space on the screen for other results. So I think it will be a configurable option in WPFTS Settings.
Also, I would like to add a configurable option to put a text like "...other 5 appearances" at the end of the excerpt. Thanks for the idea!
We also have some other things to play with Smart Excerpts (for example, lots of developers asked me to add page numbers in case an excerpt was taken from the paged document), so I guess it will add those features one-by-one.
Also, the documentation for the plugin requires a sufficient upgrade, and I definitely will include this explanation there.
Thank you!
When you ever try to search WordPress posts or pages by shortcode content inserted to posts, you should notice that it's a not trivial task!
Simply say, it's not possible for the native WordPress search. And you even can not solve this by simple PHP code. But why? Well, let me explain to you in detail.
Shortcodes are tags like [the_shortcode] included in the post content. Lots of plugins use this technique to insert their custom (and sometimes quite complex) content into the post, and this powerful functionality really makes the difference to us!
But why we can't search in that generated content? Because the shortcode content is never stored in the database. Instead, only the [the_shortcode] string is stored. WordPress page generation function is creating the text for shortcodes "on the fly". But native WP search is working with the database data!
Okay... so it's not possible, right?
No way! Since the WPFTS plugin is indexing, it does provide the ability to store "generated" shortcode content in the search index together with the post content! And thus, posts/pages become searchable by the shortcode content!
Let me give you an example.
Assume we have a post with the content like this:
The cats always have their wonderful and useful devices like [cats_devices].
As you can see, this content has the shortcode, which will be replaced by the string "fluffy paws, long tail, furry back, and purr" on the page generation stage. But only the initial content will be stored in the database.
Assume you want to find this post by the word "tail" using an integrated WP search. You will find... nothing!
Now listen, what the WPFTS plugin does: at the moment when you save your post, it renders the post content as it should look on the frontend - with all these shortcodes rendered and then store the result in the search index!
Later, when you're trying to search for the word "tail", it will return the post ID, because it knows - the "tail" will be on the page!
![E20201119-051309-001[1].png](/forum/assets/uploads/files/1605744853933-e20201119-051309-001-1.png)
And even more - this full phrase will be shown in the Smart Excerpt. Cool, right?
The respective option was added to the WPFTS Settings / Indexing Engine / Indexing Defaults tab and it is enabled by default, but who knows, just be sure you have this enabled to use this cool feature!
![E20201119-045918-001[1].png](/forum/assets/uploads/files/1605744020586-e20201119-045918-001-1.png)
You don't need for Pro version to try this cool functionality: shortcode content search is available in the basic (free) version of WPFTS.
Hope this post made your day. Or an hour. Or at least minute 
Hi @Nick
I'm assuming here that WPFTS only returns a single result for a document containing the search term, even though the search term might appear several times in various parts of the document?
The Smart Excerpt algorithm will try to show all found sentences while it's possible to fit them into the excerpt length limit (e.g. 500 characters). In case it found just one sentence with the queried word(s), it will show only that sentence. It avoids adding some "dummy" sentences around in order to save screen space for other search results.
How does it decide which excerpt to display,
First, it finds the shortest sentences with all queried words inside. Then it will find the shortest sentence with the remaining words. It will add more sentences after that, in case it's possible within the length limit.
and would it be possible to add a flag in the search results to state something like "Search term appears a further x times in the document"?
It depends on the query mode you're using. Sometimes people prefer to use "OR" logic, in this case, these sentences which contain at least one word may be recognized as "good". If you are using "AND" logic, then we should recognize only sentences that contain ALL words only. However, in the real-life, the search algorithm does not make difference between sentences while searching. It's intentionally done because in complex texts you can find words close, but placed in different sentences. For example for the phrase "beautiful cats," the next text should be recognized as good: "Article about cats. They are just beautiful.". In this case, Smart Excerpt will show both sentences. So it's just not possible to count the exact "number of appears".
What we actually can do is to place something like "(...there are more appears)" at the end of the excerpt in case we were unable to show all the "good" sentences because of length limitation. Good idea. I definitely need to implement this.
my current view is that the excerpt should always be a continuous copy of the original
It is mostly impossible to save all the text between two sentences because two "good" sentences can be far from each other (and it's often so) so it's not possible to show the whole of this construction within the boundaries of 500 characters.
Yes, sometimes it's not enough text to understand the context since sentences could be pretty short like your #1 case. But people always can click on to search result item and find the context in the original post.
paragraph breaks might be good indicators, better still a double paragraph break (i.e. a blank line in the text)
Often it's not simple to detect the end of the start of the paragraph. Because of text type. If you're using plain text, you can use either one or two linefeed characters to form paragraphs. When you're using HTML, you may use <p> tags instead or two <br> tags... etc. That's why we still stick with sentence boundaries.
One more good idea which I have is to add some delimiter characters between the sentences which are not linked in the original text, for example, if we removed some text between two "good" sentences, we may put "..." there to indicate that the part of the text was hidden. It should remove the mess.
What do you think?
According to your information, the Smart Excerpt algorithm works correctly for your specific example.
The Smart Excerpt has a goal to show as much as possible relevant information from the found post content. At the same time, it tries to avoid showing any non-relevant information, since the max length of the excerpt is limited.
First, the algorithm breaks the whole text into sentences. Then it selects the most relevant sentences from the list (those ones which have most of the search words included). It also throws out those sentences which do not contain at least one of the search words (it's your case #3 - all the middle sentences were thrown away because they didn't have any queried words).
Your first case looks wrong, but actually the phrase "RCHS 1985, ISBN 0-901461-38–5 £2.40 + p&p." is limited by periods from both ends, so the algorithm assumes it's a complete sentence.
Yes, this is the bad case, and it's relatively rare, and I don't know how to make it better.
I could add one more previous sentence or the next sentence to "extend" the excerpt up to 500 symbols, but not sure it will be a good solution in the common case. Nobody likes the dummy "water" in the text just to make the text bigger, right?
What was your idea or recommendations by the way? How the ideal excerpt should look for you?
Again thank you for sharing issues and propositions!
Hey, if you are using the BuddyPress system, should be you're also using BuddyDrive to store user files. Simple and nice file storage system, right. But there is a small problem is the impossibility to search those files by content.
Here in this small article, I going to explain to you how to make this search happen in just a dozen lines of the PHP code!
First of all, let's check the wp_posts table to understand how BuddyPress stores uploaded files. Each new file makes another record in wp_posts where post_type is equal to buddydrive-file and post_status is equal to buddydrive_public. Also, it feels like the file URL is stored in the wp_posts.guid column.
Well, quite not standard, but nothing too complex for WPFTS Pro.
Let's create some code to make that type of records understandable for the WPFTS indexer.
add_filter('wpfts_index_post', function($index, $post)
{
global $wpfts_core;
if ($post && $wpfts_core) {
if ($post->post_type == 'buddydrive-file') {
$url = $post->guide;
if (strlen($url) > 0) {
// We need to include WPFTS Utils library to extract file content
require_once $wpfts_core->root_dir.'/includes/wpfts_utils.class.php';
// Extract data from the file by given URL (assuming this URL is mapped to local filesystem!)
$ret = WPFTS_Utils::GetCachedFileContent_ByLocalLink($url);
// Store extracted text (if present) into the specific index cluster
$index['attachment_content'] = isset($ret['post_content']) ? trim($ret['post_content']) : '';
}
}
}
return $index;
}, 3, 2);
That's all? No, unfortunately. The indexer understands BuddyDrive-specific records, but WP_Query() still has no idea how to search them.
So let's add another hook.
add_action('pre_get_posts', function(&$wpq)
{
// We going to modify parameters only if we are in the main query and it's a text search
if ($wpq->is_main_query() && $wpq->is_search) {
// We going to add buddydrive files to the search results only if attachment search
// is enabled (and thus, "inherit" and "attachments" are already in the list)
if (in_array('inherit', $wpq->query_vars['post_status'])) {
$wpq->query_vars['post_status'][] = 'buddydrive_public';
}
if (in_array('attachment', $wpq->query_vars['post_type'])) {
$wpq->query_vars['post_type'][] = 'buddydrive-file';
}
}
}, 20);
Okay, and now that's all?
Yes! Now you need to rebuild the index and then you can see the BuddyDrive searchable in the frontend search, wow!
But you still can see one problem there. If you click on the search result, it redirects you to nowhere, because WordPress still not understand what is the link to the "single page" of the BuddyDrive "post" record.
Let's make it clearer! As we investigated above, BuddyPress stores the file URL in the guid column.
add_filter('wpfts_se_titlelink', function($r1, $post)
{
if ($post && ($post['post_type'] == 'buddydrive-file')) {
$r1['link'] = $post['guid'];
}
return $r1;
}, 10, 2);
Okay! Now it finally works.
Something not yet clear? Keep the community posted.
If you just want the ready code for your website, download it:
wpfts-addon-buddydrive-1.0.2.zip
Another good and clean theme (and it's also free) called Storefront which not show excerpts in search results neither for posts and pages nor for files. This way, search for files by their content works well, but the Storefront theme only displays titles (filenames).
Usual and the simplest way to fix this is to redefine the search.php template in the child theme like we did it for the Thrive Nouveau theme. But may we achieve that without creating the child theme? If you downloaded the theme from the official WP repository, it has not child theme in the package.
After the fast analyze of the theme, I found that the excerpt is generated by the function storefront_post_content located in the file inc/storefront-template-functions.php and it uses the the_content() call to show both full-content and short content of posts. You may check WP documentation to understand how it works.
But this method is not acceptable for us, because WPFTS Pro catches and uses the the_excerpt() hook to show its famous Smart Excerpt. So what I gonna do is to replace this function completely.
I don't need to remove the existing function from the theme, because the theme only creates this function if it was not defined before. So what I need to do is to DEFINE my function before the theme.
I going to create a simple plugin and put this code into it.
/**
* This code will be called BEFORE the Storefront's original code
*/
if (!function_exists('storefront_post_content')) {
function storefront_post_content()
{
global $wp_query;
?>
<div class="entry-content">
<?php
/**
* Functions hooked in to storefront_post_content_before action.
*
* @hooked storefront_post_thumbnail - 10
*/
do_action( 'storefront_post_content_before' );
if ($wp_query && $wp_query->is_main_query() && $wp_query->is_search) {
// We are using the_excerpt() for search result always!
the_excerpt();
} else {
// We are using old method for all other pages
the_content(
sprintf(
__( 'Continue reading %s', 'storefront' ),
'<span class="screen-reader-text">' . get_the_title() . '</span>'
)
);
}
do_action( 'storefront_post_content_after' );
wp_link_pages(
array(
'before' => '<div class="page-links">' . __( 'Pages:', 'storefront' ),
'after' => '</div>',
)
);
?>
</div><!-- .entry-content -->
<?php
}
}
Note: this code should be run from the plugin to get a priority before the original code.
To shorten your work, I have compiled this code into a small plugin and you can download it here.
wpfts-addon-storefront-1.0.0.zip
Was this helpful for you?
I noticed that the Thrive Nouveau theme does not show post/page excerpts by default and, yes, it also does not show any preview of indexed and found file content.
The reason for this is very simple: the theme does not show excerpts at all, and it is inside its template. So is it possible to fix that?
Yes, what we actually should do is switch to the Thrive Nouveau Child theme (since we going to change theme files and we don't want these changes to be overwritten by the next theme update).
Right after the switching, find the file content-search.php which is inside the template-parts subfolder, and then copy it to the same subfolder of the Child theme.
Then you have to open this file into your lovely text editor and add one line of the code after line 15:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
So final file content should look like this:
<?php
/**
* The template part for displaying results in search pages.
*
* Learn more: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy
*
* @package thrive
*/
?>
<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" <?php post_class(array('entry-search')); ?>>
<div class="entry-search-inner-wrap">
<?php the_title( sprintf( '<h1 class="h3 search-entry-title"><a href="%s" rel="bookmark">', esc_url( get_permalink() ) ), '</a></h1>' ); ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?> <!-- <<<=== We have just added this line! -->
<?php thrive_posted_on(); ?>
</div>
</div><!-- #post-## -->
That's all. Just save the file and check - now you should to see native beautiful-looking WPFTS Pro's excerpt!
Hope this was useful.