Break up multi-word group and member searches for better results

[boonebgorges]

Currently, if you search "Awesome Group" in the Groups directory, it won't return "Awesome and Cool Group". We simply take the search terms and stick them into a LIKE clause.

Making the search work really well is a hard task, but surely we can improve on this bit. Let's break up the search terms at word breaks, and do separate LIKE clauses connected by ANDs to get our results. Eg:

SELECT ... WHERE ( ( g.name LIKE '%Awesome%' OR g.description LIKE '%Awesome%' ) AND ( g.name LIKE '%Group%' OR g.description LIKE '%Group%' ) ) ...

And something similar for member/xprofile queries. See ​http://teleogistic.net/2014/01/a-less-finicky-buddypress-search/

WordPress has a lot of good stuff, introduced in ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7394, to handle this kind of stuff. Sadly, most of it is marked protected and is organized in such a way that it won't really be usable for our purposes. We could try to compartmentalize it and pass patches upstream, or simply build our own modular versions based on it.

I think we could do something pretty minimal with high impact with not too much work. So I'm putting this tentatively in 2.0.

[boonebgorges]

It's looking like I won't have time to work on this for 2.0. Moving to 2.1 for proper treatment.

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/