Omnisearch / Global Admin Search, Final Pitch

Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/omnisearch/
Diff: https://cloudup.com/cC6IbXxoHXN

Previous posts:
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/08/14/present-your-3-8-feature-idea-at-tomorrows-meeting/#comment-9948
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/08/30/omnisearch/
https://make.wordpress.org/core/2013/10/08/omnisearch-user-testing/

IRCIRC Internet Relay Chat, a network where users can have conversations online. IRC channels are used widely by open source projects, and by WordPress. The primary WordPress channels are #wordpress and #wordpress-dev, on irc.freenode.net. chats in #wordpress-coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-plugins:
https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-core-plugins&day=2013-08-30&sort=asc#m21304
https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-core-plugins&day=2013-09-12&sort=asc#m23506
https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-core-plugins&day=2013-09-19&sort=asc#m24911
https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-core-plugins&day=2013-09-26&sort=asc#m25942
https://irclogs.wordpress.org/chanlog.php?channel=wordpress-core-plugins&day=2013-10-10&sort=asc#m27386

We were a small, but scrappy group. It was mostly myself, @japh, and @lessbloat.

Omnisearch currently adds three ways to search.

  • A Dashboard WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.:
    Omnisearch Dashboard Widget
  • An adminadmin (and super admin) page under the Dashboard:
    Omnisearch Admin Page
  • And as a search box on  the adminbar — when you’re on the admin side of the site:
    Omnisearch Admin Bar

All three turn up the same results page:

Omnisearch Results Page

And all is happy with the world.

We were trying to solve the proliferation of different search forms for different data structures in the admin.  When trying to find content, it’s inconvenient and difficult to always navigate to the right data structure and then search it — especially if you’re unsure if something was in a comment or a post (all too frequent in p2s)– and you just want to pull in all relevant results.

Other things we’d considered were potentially adding an Alfred-like pop-up modal where you could enter omnisearches, and see results from the menus on the page that happen to match — very much like WP Butler’s current functionality.  We opted not to add it in this pass, though, figuring better to keep a slimmer implementation.

Our user testing confirmed that this was a definite win.  In fact, the user even remarked that there should be a centralized search when we had them running through the initial steps where they were to search each data structure independently, before activating Omnisearch and seeing how that compared.

We’re eager to hear any feedback on code, methods, or even name.  I’ve had some people mention that they’d prefer it have a less ‘marketing’ name, and more of a generalized “Global Admin Search”.  I prefer Omnisearch for brevity, but would love to hear some discussion on the pros and cons of whether it would be better to use a more general name.

#3-8, #core-plugins, #feature-plugins, #omnisearch, #proposal