AutoSuggest Searches for WordPress Released
WP AutoSuggest is a new plugin for WordPress that I released today. I needed the ability to quickly find posts when I search on my blog by typing in a keyword rather than waiting for the results page to load.
This plugin was inspired by Google’s AutoSuggest feature which was initially created by Yahoo. Also, Facebook has been using this technique frequently which helps load data faster and of course consumes less bandwidth on both the client and the server’s ends.
Installing this plugin is very straight forward:
- Download it from the WordPress plugins repository
- Upload the directory wp-autosuggest to your WordPress plugins directory (/wp-content/plugins/).
- Activate the plugins from the Plugins section in your WP Admin area.
Note: For some templates, the designers have changed the Input ID of the search (I did that), so you can change the ID of your search box from the Settings > WP Autosuggest (It’s s by default).
There are a lot of customizations and options I’m considering, like Color Themes, Display etc… If you are familiar with the WordPress Codex and feel like contributing to this plugin, contact me!
WP AutoSuggest page has been created for you to follow the updates which will be followed by a detailed blog post.
If you have some suggestions, please write a comment.
Stay tuned.
I am Elie El Khoury, from Lebanon (Byblos), Woopra co-founder & CIO, Web & Software Developer, Designer, Guitarist, Mac user and the worst blogger on earth! 
Looks great dude as usual
Good job, Elie!
[...] to participating in blog carnivals: * They improve your authority * You quickly get profitable, AutoSuggest Searches for WordPress Released – ekhoury.com 12/14/2008 wp-autosuggest WP AutoSuggest is a new plugin for WordPress that I [...]
Looks great, but it doesn’t seem to work for my site.
http://www.404techsupport.com
I installed the plug-in using the WP 2.7 plugin installer (versus the traditional copy to the site) and activated it. Is there anything else I need to do?
I have Andreas09 theme, but the input is still named $s.
Thanks!
I take that back. It works great in IE, just not in Firefox. But it works on your site in Firefox…
Hmm…
@Jason:
I checked your website. Your input ID is “searchbox” not “s”. Good luck.
Thanks so much. I changed it to ‘searchbox’ in the settings and now it’s working. Sorry for my mistake.
This plug-in looks great!
Hi!
Installed your plugin. Yeah, it’s very good idea, but all my posts are beginning with pictures and when I’m typing something in searchbox html-code of pictures is appearing. Cn’t you fix this problem and add option to show only text. And various max length of anounsces would be good. Or option like “Only titles”.
Thanx for plugin. I’m waiting for new versions.
Elie, here are some suggestions for a next release:
1. Include tags/categories along with regular results. That implies that you have to show them above regular results in a different format
2. Let the user set the number of results (first X results). This is very usefull as in one of my sites, the most popular query returns a large set of results.
3. Let the users choose if they want only titles
Otherwise a great plugin and very expected i guess
I’m waiting for 0.2 
Hello; great plugins !! But it doesn’t work on my site. input id is on “s” ?
There is a probleme with template ?
This plugin works only with templates that have wp_footer(); added before the closing body tag because it injects a Javascript code in the footer.
So make sure your footer.php template file contains < ?php wp_footer(); ?> before the closing body tag.
Really nice script, it works really well in Firefox but not at all in Internet Explorer 7.0 ? Checked the ID and it’s correct, also checked so that the right code is before the closing tag in the footer.php file.
Works for me in IE7. Check http://video.metalz.info
Awesome plugin
we’ll install it on iLabz for sure !
Simpler yet AMAZING !!! 100 % elie khoury
Ho….I’m so sad…It doesn’t work.
Template : Interphase
No
Thank’s
Touwal
I’m interested to see if this can be adapted for use within BuddyPress, the beta of which was just released.
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Hi,
Thank you for the plugin.
I’ve got two requests if that is possible. To make the width of the ajax window variable (ie to be possible to make it wider then the search box/form).
The other is UTF character coding for non-western languages… the majority of the web I guess…
perhaps the best plugin of the month!
i was searching something like this…i’ve tried some other hand writting technics but nothing worked… so finally your plugin make job. Thanks for share it !
tomorrow i’ll try it…now, i’m gonna play football
This is an awesome plugin! Great work there!
So, i can suggest only two things:
1. Support UTF characters for non-western languages (as V suggested a couple of comments before), as my website is in Greek!
2. My blog has almost 2000 posts, so it takes a lot of seconds before you start seeing results. Is it possible to speed this up?
Thank you a lot once again. I am really looking forward for the next versions!
Elie, just a simple question… how can i remove excerpt, showing only titles as results ?
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Great plugin. I’ll replace the search for all our blogs with this one. Thanks.
@dlv: I’ll add this feature in the next release
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Really nice plugin, but I have some suggestions
#1 First Speed up, take like 10 seconds to show some results
#2 Its only looks in the Title, should search in the Body, The Tags, The Categories.
#3 The Wide size should be regulated
#4 should have support for non english characters
#5 Did I mention Speed?
Anyway I hope a new version soon, this is the 0.1 version, ufff there’s a lot of potencial here.
Love it
ok, thanks Elie
I agree with some Nehemoth’s point… good luck for the new release, thanks for work on it!
I have a Farsi (Persian) website (http://ziapour.com). For me, it didn’t work in Firefox at all, and in IE, it is not finding anything and just shows my Not Found message. Also changing the typing language from Farsi to English and vice versa, cause a Java Script error, so I have to deactivate it again
Great plugin! I have one small issue — it’s not respecting the limit I set to the number of results — they just keep on going, extending the page to fit!
Using on WP 2.7 and the K2 theme.
George, this will be fixed in the next version.
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Elie — Great to hear! Thank you.
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Waiting for update
\waiting for update here too.
Using 2.7 with “s” as search ID.
Can’t get it working here, as well.
It’s always showing me 10 results,
no matter if they match or not.
if they match it marks the right part/word in the title,
if it doesnt match it marks the first letters of the title
(as many letters marked as the search term has).
Can we hope for a fix anytime soon, Elie?
Hold up the good work! Appreciate it alot!
Hi at all,
I’m using this plugin with WordPress 2.7.
It works with Internet Explorer but not with Firefox.
Is it normal?
No Lucas, Is not normal, It should work.
Hi Nehemoth,
First of all, thank you for your replay.
I’m using 0.1 version of WP AutoSuggest plugin. It works fine under IE but non with Firefox.
I’ve tried with Firefox under Windows (vers. 2.0.0.2) and Iceweasel under Debian (vers. 3.0.5-1).
Can you help me? Have you idea what is the cause of this problem?
Thank you!!
Hello,
very cool plugin, can you help me for my website?
I have the following error:
Ajax error: 500
I insert as ID searchbox and s too but doesn’t work.
I’m using wordpress 2.7.
Thank you very much in advanced.
Regards
Same issue as other here – it doesn’t seem to work under Firefox, Chrome or Opera. I’ve tried a few thing’s but no joy yet. Works fine in IE7
@1uk3
Make sure you change your Search ID to “qsearch”. Most probably, you have left it “s” which is the NAME not the ID of the Search input field.
@Elie – you’re a star! All working now. Just me being dumb!
Hi!
Great plugin, but it show something like Ð and so on, becouse i have russian blog and UTF-8 encoding. Maybe you can fix it?
Great plugin but it contain too many bugs, (support for non english characters etc). When are you planning the next version? Looking forward to it!!
Hi. WP-Autosuggest is great! I was doing something like this to my theme, but even better – external plugin that works automaticly just kicks ass..!!
Anyway, there’s just something that I wanted to say:
1) .gif files for round corners of the speech bubble.. Well, they don’t equip transparency – so they look great on white – and only on white background :/
2) I use this plugin on my site, http://poplarware.com/languageplugin.html ; It is a plugin to make your site a multi-lingual experience, it will translate (if properly configured and plugins and theme(s) support gettext/localization) your whole site to another language(s) – ofcourse, posts you will have to manually write with as many languages as you want them to be published as.. Anyway, rather than using a static no results text, you could implement a translation for your plugin – maybe you want to add this option either way and use preset from translation file if this settings is empty..
3) About translation again.. When I write multi-lingual posts, I use tags like lang_en lang_fi lang_all and your plugin just don’t go this way.. I mean, when I see headers from my posts, I see these tags and I see all the avail translations (if they fit to the preview) while my translation plugin should select what it outputs according to my translation setting..
Great work..
Maybe you could add a setting to turn of post previews in wp-autosuggest, this way; people having problems with it – could just turn it off and use instead only a list of titles in wp-autosuggest..?
I almost forgot, here’s a link to a good site explaining about wordpress localization support..
http://blog-en.icanlocalize.com/installing-wordpress-for-multiple-language-blogs/how-to-localize-wordpress-themes-and-plugins-with-gettext/
using yr plugin w 769 posts, works like a charm! Recommend it as one of t most valuable plugins for WP! Thank u – chris
First I installed the plugin, it did not work. Then I found that the search box of my theme did not have ID.
I added an ID ==> It work. Thank you so much.
Hi. Your plugin is great, but doesn’t validate. There’s an easy fix: just find ‘&’ and replace with ‘&’. Cheers!
I updated plugin again. 0.23 has been released – it’s a minor change to javascript but it makes enter to work as submit button in any browser(which has js support and js enabled) – this way people are not required to have a submit button in their search forms.. But if you wish, you still can add a submit button – either way; wp-autosuggest 0.23 – helping people to make nicer themes now as well..
Vaclav Vancura; could you please be more specific? you propably mean using & amp but I still don’t follow you – and I didn’t find this problem with w3c validator.. (I used this page on validator)
nice plugin.
but i have some questions.
1) how to change colors of suggested bobble ?
2) is there any cached queries to speed up search ?
3) can it be combined with opensearch (where your browser search provider gives suggestions) ?
1) change plugins css file under folder css – or just check them out and change values defined in your theme instead.
2) It’s super fast, so no
3) No.
Great plugin, but it dosn´t work on my site…
any ideia ?
latest WordPress release…
Very nice plugin…
I have done bit of changes. I wanted to just appear the title so i removed the get_the_content() and also the [...] from excerpt. Hope you don’t mind.
Just one question i have, how do i add filter to it. I want to search only categories not pages…. Please Help………!!!
Great plugin. It would be nice to have an option to disable showing excerpts in the results.
Thanks
Is there any way i can get the search result to appear above the search box? I have the search in the footer and would like the serch results to ‘grow’ from the top of the box.
Thanks
David
I can’t use your plugin. Not work for my theme
Is it possible to have image thumbnails in the search results, I use the
to call a thumbnail. But I may change it with wordpress 2.9 to use the new function. If it had a little thumbnail for the post that would be on point
Thanks
php the_post_thumbnail
it stripped my code
So far, the Plugin doesn’t work at all. I’m running WordPress 2.9.1
The only place I do get anything is an AJAX error on the search results page itself (type 0).
Also, the CSS styling is breaking my design; why would you want to alter the body tag style?
I have been using it for years and wouldnt use anything else!
[...] Autosuggest searches for WordPress Share: [...]
Here is a post on how to make qTranslate and wp_autosuggest work together WordPress WP_autosuggest and qTranslate. In case you need it
I have been using it for years and wouldnt use anything else!
Hello,
I really want to use AutoSuggest Searches for WordPress on my site to search on WPDirectory Pro with Glossy Stylo Theme. How can I configure it?
Thanks in advance!