After buying the Premium version of the Relevanssi plugin for making WordPress search work better than normal. I realised that it didn’t do exactly what I (and the client) wanted.

My client wanted to be able to put a specific page/post at the top of results for certain search terms. Even to be able to specify the weight of the result - so that the page/post could be put anywhere in the results.

I’d slightly mis-read the features of the Relevanssi Premium and was a bit annoyed that I’d spent money on something that didn’t do what I wanted it to. I looked in to other search plugin’s for WordPress but they were all much more expensive and didn’t have this feature either.

I thought I would contact the Relevanssi developer, Mikko Sarri, and ask if anything could be done. Sure enough, after some explanation of what I was after and some very nice emails from Mikko. I was given 9 lines of code that added what I wanted to the plugin.

Together with the Custom Content Type Manager Plugin (and a little hacking to make it work together) I have a box at the bottom of the page/post editor that I can enter search terms and their weights.

Perfect!

This brings me on to why I love WordPress and other open source projects: openness.

If this had been a massive, closed source project, there is no way I could have contacted the developer (the actual developer who wrote it) and asked for help. Even if I couldn’t contact anyone, I have the code and could have spent some time looking through it to hack my own solution (which I end up doing for a lot of WP plugins).

A number of people out there use WordPress but aren’t happy hacking code. To those people; if there’s something you want but no body has created, try contacting the developer or asking in the forums. It could be something that’s not well advertised or it could be something totally new (and possibly useful for others).