Today, we're thrilled to introduce a Geek ElasticSearch 5.6.0, a significant update developed to enrich the Searching system of your website. The new version is packed with compatibility for Joomla 5, PHP 8.3, new integrations and a series of improvements.
What’s new?
Search Highlighting
The Search Highlighter feature enables highlighting search terms in search results. In the previous versions, we developed a function to get a part of description text that contains search terms to display on search results, and use the Mark.js library to mark these search terms. This function worked well for basic search modes, but for the advanced search modes like Fuzzy search or Wildcard search, it could work inaccurately in some cases.
So we have decided to improve this feature in the new version by using the Elasticsearch Highlighting to get the highlighted snippets and highlighted fragments for search results. This change makes the Search Highlighter feature work more accurately, and the search result will display the most relevant fragments.
It is a very important change since users now can search articles or products with more accuracy, this will help users stay longer on your websites and increase conversations for your online stores.
Search words
While supporting our customers in building a search system on their websites, some people would like to create a simple search box on the homepage of the websites.
When the users enter a search word and hit the enter key (or search button), they will be redirected to the search page where search results are displayed.
To help customers implement this feature, we added a new feature to the Geek Elasticsearch module that supports getting the search word from a query string.
This enables you to use Geek ElasticSearch to create a search page which displays search results of requests sent from the search box on the homepage.
For example, if you have a simple search form as below that published on the homepage:
<form action="/search-page" method="get"> <input type="text" name="searchword" value="" /> </form>
When the users enter the keyword Thinkpad to the search field and hit the Enter key, it will redirect to the search page with the parameter searchword=Thinkpad added in the query string of a url.
/search-page?searchword=Thinkpad
And Geek ElasticSearch will get search words from a query string, perform a search and display search results of this search word.
Search by location
In the new version you can select a Distance Unit for a Geo-Distance Query feature.
You can find this setting under the tab “Search Form & Ordering” of the settings panel of the Geek ElasticSearch module.
On the search form, we also added two new features for the “Search by location” field that are: A feature to search nearby your location, and a clear button to remove the selected location.
New integrations
This release supports 3 new components that are: JoomCRM, My Map Location, and Matukio Events.
Geek ElasticSearch now includes 60+ built-in integration plugins in its package that supports almost all popular Joomla components from all categories including Social, Shopping Cart, CCK, Listing, Page Builder, Directory, etc..
Geek ElasticSearch 5.6.0 changelog:
- Improved. Upgrade to work compatible with PHP 8.3.
- Improved. Change some fields on the configuration page to mandatory fields.
- New. Plugin that indexes JoomCRM (companies, people).
- New. Plugin that indexes MyMapLocation
- New. Plugin that indexes Matukio Events
- Search module:
- New. Clear the search results when deleting the search word.
- New. Get search word from query string (e.g: /search-page?searchword=test)
- New. Do a search when selecting date (from, to).
- New. Do a search when clearing the Location.
- New. Support finds my location (location field).
- New. Add the setting of the distance unit.
- Improved. function cut description with Elasticsearch Highlighting.
- Improved. Refactoring code of the script file.
- Fixed. Order filter terms by title do not work if using Elasticsearch from version 6.x and above.
- Fixed. Translating additional field values does not work.
- Improved. plugin that VirtueMart products
- New. Add a new setting of selecting a Menu item.
- New. Support plugin Customs For All.
- Improved. Check price override.
- Improved. Use the parent image if the child product has no image.
- Improved. Hide discontinued products from search results.
Installation and upgrade instructions:
Before upgrading, please take a full backup of your sites.
Geek ElasticSearch download includes components, modules, and all the integration plugins.
- You can download the new version here.
- Install the Package on your Joomla site as a normal Joomla extension.
Core features of the best Search & Filter component for Joomla!
Not like Smart Search and other Joomla search components that use PHP & MySQL technology.
Geek ElasticSearch is developed based on Elasticsearch - one of the most powerful open-source search engines in the world. This makes it really different from other search components.
If you haven’t used Geek ElasticSearch, below is a list of its core features that you can refer to and check if you want to use it for your websites or for your next projects.
Realtime search
Fast, very fast speed is the first thing that Elasticsearch will impress you. Once you finish typing in the search box, or changing any options of the search form, search results are immediately updated without a delay.
Flexible Facet Filters system
Users can filter search results by content type, by categories, by language, by access, by author, by custom fields of Joomla, VirtueMart, eShopping, AdsManager, JReviews, .. This powerful filter system enables users to quickly find expected results from thousands or millions of records with just some simple clicks.
Geo-distance query
This feature specially supports location-based extensions such as EasySocial, JomSocial, JEvents, DJ-Classifieds,… It enables users to narrow search results within a specific distance from a geo point.
Take full advantages of Elasticsearch’s abilities
The component enables you to update Elasticsearch index settings, to change the Analyzers, Character Filters, Tokenizer and Token Filters to meet the requirements of a search that your websites need.
Search an Entire Website
Geek ElasticSearch enables you to search data from Joomla articles and all 3rd-party components installed on your sites with only one search form. You can use it to replace all the search forms that developed individually for each component.
With 60+ integration plugins packed in the latest version 5.6.0, Geek ElasticSearch is a search component that supports the most 3r-party Joomla extensions (supports 49 popular Joomla components including VirtueMart, Hikashop, JoomSocial, EasySocial, JReviews, Zoo CCK, DJ-Classifieds, RSDirectory, … ).
You can find the list of all supported components here
Best search solution for large websites
Searching data in the large websites always has a big trouble with any search components. It can cause out of memory / disk space issues and affect the performance of your websites. That’s why Joomla recommended not to use Smart Search on a large website.
Elasticsearch is a RESTful, distributed search and analytics engine developed for the systems and websites with big amounts of data. So Geek ElasticSearch is the best solution for a large Joomla website. Its search module will query data from Elasticsearch server rather than from MySQL database, so it won’t affect the performance of your websites.
We have a lot of customers who successfully integrated Geek ElasticSearch for websites with hundreds of thousands of articles or millions of products. You can check some featured websites using Geek ElasticSearch here.
Conclusion
Since the effective on-site search functionality is crucial for any website, it directly impacts user experience, accessibility, and engagement. Whether visitors are shopping online, reading articles, or seeking specific information, a powerful search function can make their experiences smooth and intuitive, save time and reduce frustrations.
We have spent 8 years developing and upgrading Geek ElasticSearch to assist our customers in building an effective search system for Joomla websites. We hope that you will be the next customer who successfully integrates Geek ElasticSearch to your websites :)
If you have any questions about Geek ElasticSearch, please create a new topic on the forum or submit a ticket, we will check and reply you in 24-48 hours.