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This Saturday, I will be presenting “Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch,” focused on ElasticPress, at WordCamp Nashville. 10up’er Zack Rothauser will also be in attendance.

Up in New England at WordCamp Maine, CEO John Eckman presents, “The Four Agreements and Client Services,” covering core tenets from the popular self-help book (The Four Agreements). Jason Clarke and Jason Boyle will also be attending.

Meet ElasticPress

We are proud to announce the release of a new plugin, ElasticPress, to the WordPress community. The project started as an internal initiative to meet a particularly common yet difficult client request: improved WordPress search.

ElasticPress

ElasticPress integrates WordPress search with Elasticsearch which has become increasingly prominent powering search on major enterprise websites such as Github and WordPress.com. Elasticsearch is a scalable, peformant, and open source standalone search server based on a technology from Apache called Lucene. Besides being fast and scalable, Elasticsearch can do things like relevant results, autosuggest, geographic search, fuzzy matching, data weighting, and more.

ElasticPress ties your Elasticsearch instance to WordPress. It is a lightweight plugin that overrides the WP_Query object to return posts from Elasticsearch instead of MySQL. There are a number of special WP_Query parameters that the plugin supports to do things like meta, taxonomy, and author searches. ElasticPress can also handle cross-blog search on WordPress multi-site installations.

Full documentation and usage instructions for the plugin are on Github. ElasticPress requires WP-CLI as it is preferable to handle things like bulk indexing through PHP CLI.

Please reach out on Github with any questions. We are happy to help and greatly appreciate contributions.