Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch
- 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.
- 6. WordPress Complex Queries Are Slow • Querying for posts that contain multiple meta keys. • Querying for posts that contain multiple taxonomies.
- 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 • etc…
- 13. ElasticPress A free 10up WordPress plugin that creates a framework for dramatically improving WordPress performance and search.
- 14. ElasticPress • Build filterable performant queries (filter by taxonomy term, post meta key, etc.). • Fuzzy search post title, content, excerpt, taxonomy terms, post meta, and authors. • Search across multiple blogs in a multisite instance. • Search results returned by relevancy. Relevancy calculations are highly customizable. Weight results by date. • Very extensible and performant.
- 15. ElasticPress Requirements • WordPress 3.7+ • An instance of Elasticsearch.
- 16. Installation • Github: http://github.com/10up/elasticpress • WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ elasticpress
- 17. Point to Your ES Instance
- 18. Sync Your Content • Just activating the plugin will do nothing. We need to sync (index) our content.
- 20. Integrate with Search • Now that our content is synced, we have access to all the powerful ElasticPress functionality i.e. query content through ElasticPress and install ElasticPress modules (WooCommerce). • We need to tell ElasticPress to run all our search queries through Elasticsearch
- 22. What Happens Next? • Once ElasticPress is activated and posts are indexed, it will integrate with WP_Query to run queries against Elasticsearch instead of MySQL. • WP_Query integration will only happen on search queries (if “Elasticsearch integration” is enabled) or when the ep_integrate parameter is passed.
- 23. 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’, … ) );
- 24. Advanced Queries • 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!
- 25. Example Queries new WP_Query( array( ’s’ => ‘vienna austria’, ‘sites’ => ‘all’, ) );
- 26. Example Queries new WP_Query( array( ’s’ => ‘vienna austria’, ‘search_fields’ => array( ‘post_title’, ‘post_content’, ‘taxonomies’ => array( ‘category’ ), ), ) );
- 27. 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’ ), ), ) );
- 28. 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, ) );
- 29. Example Queries new WP_Query( array( ‘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’, ), ) );
- 30. Example Queries new WP_Query( array( ‘meta_query’ => array( array( ‘key’ => ‘city_name’, ‘value’ => ‘vienna’, ), array( ‘key’ => ‘number_key’, ‘value’ => 5, ‘compare’ => ‘>’, ), array( ‘key’ => ‘exists_key’, ‘compare’ => ‘exists’, ), ), ) );
- 31. 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.
- 32. ElasticPress Modules • We want to speed up all things WordPress. This includes third party plugins too.
- 33. ElasticPress Modules • ElasticPress WooCommerce http://wordpress.org/plugins/elasticpress- woocommerce • ElasticPress Related Posts https://github.com/10up/ElasticPress-Related- Posts • More coming soon.
- 34. ElasticPress in Your Language • ElasticPress is designed to be internationalized. • Out of the box, it will work fine with most languages.
- 35. 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.
- 36. 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
- 37. Documentation Full documentation with installation instructions: https://github.com/10up/ElasticPress
- 38. Feedback and Continuing Development • If you are using ElasticPress on a project, please let us know and give us feedback. • Pull requests are welcome!
- 39. Questions? We need to send a PUT request to this endpoint with our post data. Of course we must authenticate before doing this. @tlovett12 [email protected]