I’ve long wanted to be able to do some simple, operated-powered searches within WordPress (especially relevant in a project I’m working on at Automattic). After a conversation with Allen, where he wanted to do the same thing, I figured I’d just whip up a quick plugin to see how hard it’d be. Turns out the answer is “not very”.

Simple Search Operators is a quick plugin that expands the functionality of the default search system in WordPress so that you can use a few useful operators (might look at adding some more at some point) [all links in the following list go to live searches on this site, using that operator]:

• author:beau will limit results to posts written by the author with the username/slug ‘beau’
• tag:burrito will only return posts which are tagged with ‘burrito’
• category:posts (or cat:posts) to search for posts categorized as ‘posts’
• tag:burritofriday cancun author:beau to search for posts containing ‘cancun’, written by ‘beau’, tagged as ‘burritofriday’

Some caveats:

• Not heavily tested! May well be capable of generating server-melting queries
• Only supports one of each operator for now
• Operators and freeform searches may be combined (e.g.: “tag:burrito cancun”)
• Does not support spaced strings for operators, so you can only do things where a no-space string attached to an operator will get you what you want
• Because of the way it manipulates query variables, might mess with other plugins or themes in adverse ways. Like I said, not heavily tested.
• Not available via the WP Plugin Repo yet; will get it up there once it’s baked a little bit

If you’d like to give it a shot, please do. If you’d like to add more operators; shoot me a pull request and we can expand this out a bit.