1. Modernizing WordPress
Search with Elasticsearch

2. Who Am I?
• My name is Taylor Lovett
• Director of Web Engineering at 10up
• Open source community member
• WordPress core contributor
• ElasticPress team member
@tlovett12

3. Doesn’t WordPress have
search built-in?

4. WordPress Search is Rudimentary
• Only searches post title, content, and excerpt.
• Relies on MySQL and thus is slow.
• Relevancy calculations are poor and overly
simplistic.
• Not able to handle any advanced filtering.

5. Think Beyond Search

6. WordPress Complex Queries Are Slow
• Querying for posts that contain multiple meta
keys.
• Querying for posts that contain multiple
taxonomies.

7. What is Elasticsearch?
http://www.elastic.co

8. Elasticsearch
• Open-source search server written in Java
based on a technology called Lucene (open-
source search software by Apache).
• A standalone database server that provides a
RESTful interface to accept and store data in a
way that is optimized for search and multi-
dimensional queries.
• Extremely scalable, performant, and reliable

9. Elasticsearch
• Relevant results
• Performant aggregation queries
• Autosuggest
• Fuzzy matching
• Geographic searches and queries
• Filterable searches and queries
• Data weighting
• Much more

10. Get an Elasticsearch Server
• Very flexible and customizable. There is not
really a “one size fits all” setup. Generally, you
have two options:
• Option 1: Pay someone else to manage/host
your Elasticsearch cluster (SaaS)
• Option 2: Host your own cluster

11. Elasticsearch SaaS
• elasticpress.io
• qbox.io
• heroku.com
• elastic.co

12. What is ElasticPress?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/elasticpress

13. ElasticPress
ElasticPress is a fast and flexible search and
query engine for WordPress.

14. ElasticPress Features
• Instantly find the content you’re looking for. The
first time. Advanced relevancy algorithm which
includes date weighting, term/meta searching,
fuzzy matching, and more.
• Search and query across multiple blogs in a
multisite instance.
• Extremely performant related content widget.

15. ElasticPress Features
• Dramatically improve performance of admin queries to
assist editors in finding content.
• Indexes text inside of popular file types (pdf, ppt, doc,
etc), and adds those files types to search results.
• Autosuggest for search - suggest relevant content as
text is entered into the search field.
• WooCommerce integration that improves faceting and
product look up speed as well as order search in the
admin.

16. ElasticPress Requirements
• WordPress 3.7+
• An instance of Elasticsearch.

17. Installation
• Github: http://github.com/10up/elasticpress
• WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/plugins/
elasticpress

18. Connect to Elasticsearch

19. Activate Features

20. Sync Your Content

21. Query API

22. Query Integration
new WP_Query( array(
’s’ => ‘search terms’,
‘author_name’ => ‘taylor’,
…
) );
new WP_Query( array(
’ep_integrate’ => ‘true’,
‘author_name’ => ‘taylor’,
…
) );
new WP_Query( array(
‘author_name’ => ‘taylor’,
…
) );

23. Advanced Query API
• Search taxonomy terms
• Filter by taxonomy terms (unlimited dimensions)
• Search post meta
• Filter by post meta (unlimited dimensions)
• Search authors
• Filter by authors
• Search across blogs in multisite
• Complex date filtering
• more!

24. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
’s’ => ‘vienna austria’,
‘sites’ => ‘all’,
) );

25. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
’s’ => ‘vienna austria’,
‘search_fields’ => array(
‘post_title’,
‘post_content’,
‘taxonomies’ => array( ‘category’ ),
),
) );

26. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
’s’ => ‘vienna austria’,
‘post_type’ => ‘page’,
‘author_name’ => ‘taylor’,
‘search_fields’ => array(
‘post_title’,
‘post_content’,
‘meta’ => array( ‘city_name’ ),
),
) );

27. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
’s’ => ‘vienna austria’,
‘tax_query’ => array(
array(
‘taxonomy’ => ‘category’,
‘terms’ => array( ‘term1’, ‘term2’ ),
),
),
‘search_fields’ => array(
‘post_title’,
‘post_content’,
‘meta’ => array( ‘city_name’ ),
‘author_name’,
),
‘site’ => 3,
) );

28. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
‘ep_integrate’ => true,
‘tax_query’ => array(
array(
‘taxonomy’ => ‘category’,
‘terms’ => array( ‘term1’, ‘term2’ ),
‘operator’ => ‘or’,
),
array(
‘taxonomy’ => ‘custom_tax’,
‘terms’ => array( ‘customterm1’ ),
),
array(
‘taxonomy’ => ‘post_tag’,
‘terms’ => array( ‘tag1’ ),
),
‘relation’ => ‘OR’,
),
) );

29. Example Queries
new WP_Query( array(
‘ep_integrate’ => true,
‘meta_query’ => array(
array(
‘key’ => ‘city_name’,
‘value’ => ‘vienna’,
),
array(
‘key’ => ‘number_key’,
‘value’ => 5,
‘compare’ => ‘>’,
),
array(
‘key’ => ‘exists_key’,
‘compare’ => ‘exists’,
),
),
) );

30. WP_Query Integration
• We want to be able to run all (slower) WP_Query
instances through Elasticsearch.
• This means we have to support every query
parameter which isn’t the case yet. Github
contains a full list of parameters WP_Query
supports with ElasticPress and usage for each
parameter.

31. ElasticPress in Your Language
• ElasticPress is designed to be internationalized.
• Out of the box, it will work fine with most
languages.

32. Analysis and Analyzers
• When a document is indexed in Elasticsearch,
text is analyzed, broken into terms (tokenized),
and normalized with token filters.
• In normalization, strings might be lowercased
and plurals stripped.

33. Custom Analyzers
• ElasticPress by default uses a pretty standard set of
analyzers intended for the English language.
• We can easily customize our analyzers for use with
other languages by filtering ep_config_mapping
(see EP source code).
• You can read about language specific analyzers here:
http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/
reference/current/analysis-lang-analyzer.html

34. Documentation
Full documentation with installation instructions:
https://github.com/10up/ElasticPress

35. Feedback and Continuing Development
• If you are using ElasticPress on a project, please
let us know and give us feedback.
• Pull requests are welcome!

36. Questions?
We need to send a PUT request to this endpoint with
our post data. Of course we must authenticate before
doing this.
@tlovett12
taylor.lovett@10up.com
http://elasticpress.io