Search Meter WordPress plugin version 2.3

Tuesday, 28 August 2007

I have updated Search Meter, my WordPress plugin that lets you find out what your blog visitors have been searching for. The new version includes a couple of widgets to make it easy to display recent and popular searches on your blog, as well as a few other changes. Here are the details.

Widgets

Search Meter 2.3 includes two WordPress widgets. Popular Searches shows a list of the most popular search terms that have produced hits at your site during the last 30 days, and Recent Searches shows a list of the most recent searches that produced hits at your site. Readers can click search terms in the list to search for the term themselves. Both widgets display up to 5 search terms by default, but you can change this to whatever number you like.

Security

This version fixes a security hole in previous releases where it was theoretically possible for an unscrupulous website to trick you into deleting your saved search data. This was a pretty minor risk: the search data is transient anyway, and I have not heard of anyone even thinking of doing this, let alone actually managing to carry it out. Anyway, from Search Meter 2.3 the “attack” is no longer possible. Previous version are still vulnerable, so truly paranoid users should upgrade. And don’t forget to wear your tinfoil hat.

A polite suggestion

The Options and Statistics screens now include a button allowing convenient access to PayPal to make Search Meter donations. This is meant to be a gentle, unobtrusive suggestion rather than a blatant advertisement. There’s an option to turn it off if you don’t like it (or even better, if you have already made a donation).

Remember, donating is optional. You can donate nothing, or you can donate $1000 (yes, really) but Search Meter will work the same regardless.

Other changes

I have made a number of changes to the internal workings of the Search Meter code, just to tidy things up a bit and make it easier for me to work with. This version also contains the installation bug fix from Search Meter 2.2, which I released quietly a few months ago. That problem was caused by a core change made in WordPress 2.2.1.

Download

As always, go to the main Search Meter plugin page to see full details and to download Search Meter 2.3.

Tags:

5 comments

You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Hi,
    Iam using this plugin at http://www.amitbhawani.com/blog/ but i wanted to show all the search results on a page like this – coolest-gadgets.com/searches.php , is it possible to do that?
    I tried adding the code in a page – sm_list_popular_searches(‘Popular Searches’, ”, 10) but it didnt work out.
    Let me know how to make it working in a page where all the searches are displayed with alphabetical order.

  2. hello Bennett,

    Thanks for the search meter. So these calls and google incoming calls, how the database will include as labels. thanks

  3. I have a big problem with this plugins..

    I’m the administrator from a collaborative blog and Search Metter results are appearing to all users, not only to the administrator..

    It will be modified in next versions ??

    Thanks

  4. @Guga,

    You can do this by editing the plugin file. Line 69 looks like this:

    define('TGUY_SM_STATS_CAPABILITY_LEVEL', 1);

    To make stats appear only to administrators, change the 1 to 10.

Leave a comment