[Plugin: Co-Authors Plus] Search-as-you-type flawed in upgrade

For 3.1 users, the plugin uses the native user search, which admittedly is not the greatest. It’s a trade-off between search accuracy and performance. I’m considering adding an option where you can decide whether you want more accurate matching or faster matching. Thanks for the feedback!

I also would vote for allowing searching by the full name (nicename) of the author. This is really important for multi-author sites where you know other authors’ names but have no idea what their usernames are.

This is the first version of Co-Authors Plus I’ve used. Is there a line of code that can be changed to re-activate full name searching (which mcstevem says was available previously)?

You can try changing line 598 to something along the lines of:

if ( 1 == 2 && function_exists( 'get_users' ) ) {

This will force into the alternate search. You can add additional fields (e.g. user_nicename) you want to search through in the $author_fields array, two lines above.

Note: I would not recommend this if you have lots of users on your site, as you’ll likely see a pretty significant performance hit.

Making these two changes to co-authors-plus.php had no apparent effect (even after the upgrade to v2.5.2). And in theory, it should already have been working, since the original code’s $author_fields array already included display_name. (It turns out my original post misspoke — the three fields I was listing were username/display_name/email rather than username/nicename/email.) So it still appears that the plugin is searching only the username field, not the other fields specified in the array. My site has 82 users — enough that they won’t all know everyone else’s username, but not enough to cause a major performance hit if the code were searching an additional field or two, as apparently it is intended to. Any other suggestions for making the user search more useful?