WooCommerce Predictive Search is already our number 1 selling plugin. Version 2.0 is a major feature upgrade to the plugin the we are pretty excited about and it is almost her.
The WooCommerce Predictive Search plugin currently does a good job of searching by Product Names, Product SKU, Product Category and Product tags as well WordPress posts and pages.
Over the last 4 months we have had many request from pro version users for even more search features. Theses are just some of them.
- Search by Post ID
- Search my custom meta data
- Search my custom taxonomies
- Search my attributes
- Search my attribute terms e.g by Colours
- Search site meta
- Search the description text
- Search the product short description
- Search the post extract text
- Search image Alt Text
- Search misspelled words.
- Search for my cat (that one is a joke BTW)
You name, someone wants WooCommerce Predictive Search to search for it.
Looking at all these requests it struck us that what people really want to do is to be able to customize their site search in any way that they believe their customers search for products on their site.
In thinking about how to satisfy that we have developed what I think is a good solution for all. Predictive Search ‘Focus Keywords’ just like the SEO plugins ‘Focus Keywords’ except it is for site search not Google search. We have built it, tested it and it works really well. It is ready for release in our next major version update version 2.0. Here is the changelog entry
*Feature: Optimize your entire site search with WooCommerce Predictive Search ‘Focus Keywords’ – This feature allows users to optimize their ‘site search’ by adding a ‘Focus Keywords’ function to any product page, post, wp- page just like an SEO plugin except it is for site search not external search engines. This includes a new Predictive Search meta section on each product page, post and page.
How it works is if for example you have a product called ABC Widget and the product is SKU AP2401 but the public knows it as ‘black cat widget’ – you put that in the ‘Focus keywords’ and the product will show in the results when a user types ‘black cat’.
We then got to thinking – What about users who using an SEO plugin had already added ‘Focus Keywords’ for each product, page or post. Why couldn’t we make Predictive Search assign those SEO keywords to the site search. The difficulty in doing this was that Predictive Search has to be able to find and read the meta of each plugin. So what we did was looked at the 2 most popular SEO plugins – Yoast’s WordPress SEO and All in One SEO. We have built that feature and it will be in the version 2.0 release. Here is the changelog entry
* Feature: Configure the plugin to use Focus Keywords that are set in SEO plugins. Added the ability for to include any ‘Focus Keywords’ that users may have set while optimizing their site for search engines using either of these 2 leading SEO plugins. * Yoasts WordPress SEO * All in One SEO.
Version 2.0 is a massive upgrade – here are the other new features already built into the new version
Feature: ‘Pretty URL’s’ to replace the All Search results pages parameter driven URLS
Feature: Added the ability to add text content that shows inside the Search box. Added as a Global setting or can be individually set on Widgets, Shortcode or the Search Function.
Feature:Major UI upgrade. We have completely rewritten the plugins admin panel and the Predictive Search tab on the WooCommerce settings now has its own nav bar just like the WooCommerce Payment gateways. The tabs are …. Settings | All Results Search Pages | Exclude Content | | Search Function | Styling
Feature: Added a new styling lib for dropdowns and Options – this was important because it now uses the same lib as WooCommerce uses – makes excluding content a very easy thing to do for each search category.
Feature:Added Exclude content from any product page, post or page from the new Predictive Search meta box.
We are currently working on these new features
* Feature: Search box and search box drop down custom WYSIWYG styling options.
* Feature: Option to either add a default image for ‘Tag’ results or only show tag results as the tag title -> no image.
* Feature: Add Tabs for the All Results Search pages instead of the Page title links. Use the custom style of the themes WooCommerce product page tabs.
The last thing we have to do is then test it all for WooCommerce v2.0 backward compatibility.We are hoping to release WooCommerce Predictive Search by the end of this week if all goes well.
WooCommerce Predictive Search Version 2.0 upgrade will see a substantial lift in the plugins License pricing to reflect the new features and useability of the plugin. So it you have been thinking of upgrading your license I’d suggest you do so before the release.