Version 4.27 is finally here! It took a few months of hard work and weekend overtime, but it’s definitely worth it. Don’t forget to update! If you don’t have a license yet, you can get one here – I promise you it’s worth it (lifetime updates, lifetime support).
Advanced Title and Content Fields
This feature was the heart and soul when it comes to customizing the results output. It had a big issue – it was very hard to use. Chances are, that most of you have not even used it because of that.
In 4.27 this feature was enhanced with a visual editor with HTML tag support, to make it a LOT easier to utilize, even for beginners.
The advanced title/content fields editor lets you add additional fields such as:
- Categories list
- Custom field values
- Custom HTML
- Woocommerce Star rating
- Add to cart
…and many more. This helps us too, as with this new editor we can easily add more field in the future.
Divi Blogs Module Live Search and Filter
We also simplified the detection of live results filtering, making it easier to add support for more and more 3rd party modules to filter.
To kick it off, the Divi Blogs module can now be filtered via Ajax Search Pro. In the future we are planning to extend this to the Core Query Loop Block, GeneratePress’ Loop as well as Dynamic.ooo blocks.
Automated Singularization and Pluralization
When using the index table engine, an option was added to automatically singularize/pluralize text to greatly enhance the search experience. For example searches for “women” would not yield any results for keywords “woman” – but with the singularization/pluralization option enabled this is taken care of.
This feature is available in English, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish languages out of the box. It does not require any external service, nor depends on any artificial intelligence, it is built-in to the core search plugin.
Improved Grouping
When results grouping is enabled, it is now possible to convert the group headers to clickable links leading to the corresponding archive pages.
Lots of bugfixes and improvements
Here is some of the improvements, you can check out the full list on the changelog:
- Greatly improved ACF relationship field indexing
- Predictive keyword suggestions have been improved
- Greatly improved security of the output by changing the filtering method to an altered version of wp_kses_post() function
- Caching methods have been implemented to some of the repetitive queries
- Full compatibility test with PHP 8.4
- Fixed issues with keyword highlighter, Loop Grid integration, user exclusions and many more…