Version 2.5.7 is now available for all active license holders. It is a recommended update as it adds compatibility to the new character support added in WordPress 4.2 (e.g. emoji and other characters). With this update came a change to the database tables WordPress uses so as to make room for these new characters. SearchWP uses custom database tables and as a result needed to update those tables in accordance with the update to WordPress itself.
During testing, it was found that the updates to existing SearchWP installs were far too resource intensive to have them automatically apply. As a result, only new (fresh) installs of SearchWP will support these new characters. Existing installations of SearchWP will ignore emoji and other similar characters. This will not adversely affect your existing SearchWP installation unless you intentionally want to support searching emoji and other characters that have been newly-supported by WordPress.
This decision was made because the processes involved in converting an existing SearchWP index were too intense to apply automatically and could have caused issues depending on how robust the server environment was. SearchWP was designed to operate in the background, and this process of converting database character sets is too intense for that.
If you would like to enable support for these additional characters (e.g. emoji) you will need to enable the Nuke on Delete option on the Advanced settings screen (link at the bottom right of the main SearchWP settings), deactivate SearchWP, and then delete SearchWP from the Plugins page in the WordPress admin. This action will FULLY REMOVE SearchWP and ALL of it’s data. Please understand that this action cannot be undone. Once you have fully removed SearchWP you can download the latest version from your Account area, re-install SearchWP, and it will rebuild your index with emoji support.
Full changelog:
- [Fix] Fixed an issue with
utf8mb4(e.g. emoji) support (NOTE: only new installations will supportutf8mb4) — more information at https://searchwp.com/releases/ - [Change] All camelCase function and method names have been deprecated (not removed (yet)) in favor of underscores
