We’re excited to announce the newest release of ElasticPress, version 2.6! This update includes some oft-requested and helpful features, especially for site owners looking to improve the WooCommerce shopping experience for their customers:
- WooCommerce products now appear as autosuggested results.
- Author name (author_name) is not included when searching products in WooCommerce.
- Support for tax_query operators EXISTS and NOT EXISTS.
- New filter to change default orderby/sort (ep_set_default_sort).
- Ability to set autosuggest endpoint by a constant (EP_AUTOSUGGEST_ENDPOINT).
For those using our WooCommerce features, you’ll be happy to hear that product search now works seamlessly with our autosuggest feature. That means customers will be able to see matching products suggestions as they type in the search field, which will help them find what they’re looking for, and helps you boost sales! Of course, enabling autosuggest requires careful attention to Elasticsearch security, so we recommend you take steps to protect your instance (or sign up for an ElasticPress.io plan, which takes care of the secure connection with ElasticPress for you).
We’ve also added support for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS as parameters for taxonomy queries. You can now combine queries that look for taxonomy terms that exist as well as ensure that a particular item does not have another taxonomy term. This represents another step towards our goal of achieving full feature parity with the WP_Query API.
As always, we welcome any feedback or bug reports via our Github Issue tracker.