ElasticPress 3.4.2 Bug Fixes and Enhancements

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ElasticPress 3.4.2 was released on June 17th, 2020, adding a couple of helpful enhancements and squashing a few bugs. How can these make your site search and ElasticPress experience better? Find out in this quick summary! 

New to ElasticPress? Head over to our features page to learn how this fast and flexible search engine creates an elevated user experience for your site. When you’re ready to get started, you can download the free ElasticPress plugin at WordPress.org.

Index attachments with Protected Content and query for them in media search

On previous versions, if you wanted to have your Attachments post type indexed and searchable in the admin area, you would need to have the Protected Content and the Documents features enabled. This bug fix will allow you to index your Attachments post type when the Protected Content feature is enabled, bringing the fast ElasticPress experience to Media search!

This comes extremely handy if you don’t have the Ingest Attachment Elasticsearch plugin, which is needed to power the OCR (character recognition) that enables ElasticPress to search through your PDF or Office document content.

Keep in mind, though, that the search experience will lack the content analysis capability the Documents feature brings! Titles and metadata will be fully searchable, but the document content itself (if applicable) will not. Of course, if you’re using our ElasticPress.io service, you don’t need to worry about any of this–just enable both the Protected Content and Documents Features for full-text document search right out of the box.

Introducing new filters

We introduced 4 new filters with this release:

  • ep_enable_sticky_posts This lets you filter whether to enable sticky posts for any request (this comes handy, for example, if you want to enable it for REST API calls).
  • ep_sync_indexable_kill This allows you to filter whether syncing an indexable should take place.
  • ep_index_document_timeout and ep_bulk_index_timeout These come in handy when you are dealing with big attachments and you just cannot index them.

Facet widget improvements

Please note: as of version 4.7 of ElasticPress, Facets are now known as Filters.

We also introduced the following fixes:

  • Load facet scripts and styles only when they are really necessary. Improving performance
  • A bug fix to make ep_facet_search_widget filter valid. Please try this filter again if you’ve previously encountered some problems when using this when customizing the Facet Widget.
  • Adding rel="nofollow" to Facet links. Fixing a bug with Google Bot crawling different Facet links.

For the full summary please check the official Changelog: https://wordpress.org/plugins/elasticpress/#developers

Many thanks to the WordPress/ElasticPress community who submitted some of these fixes.

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