[wp-hackers] Page searching examples [was: 2.4 planning discussion]

[Daniel Cameron]

I've been waiting for this conversation since I started following the list.

> "see what people expect"

The majority of people expect for pages to show up in their results and a
large majority of them want more options. My original release for SE was
very basic, option to include pages and an option to include comments. I
never liked searching comments (since the queries would take too long) but I
added it because that's what people wanted. Now, I'm not advocating that we
"bloat" the core with a ton of options but if we were to allow for searching
of pages it should be an option. And if it's an option we might as well add
some more functionality/options to give the masses what they want or at
least fill up the new search options page :) .

> see what plugins are doing

Currently SE has category exclusion, post and page id exclusion and the
searching of excerpts, comments, excerpts, drafts, attachments, meta data
(this is huge for a lot of users) and tags (broken in 2.3). All of these
options, except tags and drafts, have been strongly expressed by the
community as "necessary" options, especially those who use Wordpress as a
CMS for development.

I also strongly believe search functionality should not be considered as
bloat aside from the most obvious unnecessary options, i.e. tags and drafts.

Honestly, I would love to see the core make my plugin obsolete; my traffic
would suffer tremendously but the great thing about that, I would be more
inclined to make something innovative or resourceful instead of a
maintaining a plugin that "fixes" what's left out of core.

-- 
Dan Cameron | http://dancameron.org