Shortlisted Hacks in Topical Search for WCEU 2022

I have been mulling over ideas for the WCEU 2022 conference, and it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to open this up to collective review.

I suggest that people should brainstorm ideas , review each other’s hacks and so on. My proposed tags to identify this quasi-thread are #WCEU , #WCEU2022 and #SHiTS (for “Shortlisted Hacks in Topical Search” 😉 ) … I’ll let someone else figure out a tagline for an alternative “Giggles” thread (LOL 😉 ).

Let me now introduce a couple of examples, introducing the types of hacks I have been thinking of — neither of these are very complex, and I expect they can be both achieved in a couple lines of code without interfering with any other code out there. The first is so simple, I am kind of amazed no one has introduced it before.

On the wordpress.com/tags page there is a search box (presumably in order to search for tags, but in fact it does nearly nothing — it merely appends whatever is typed into the search box to the URL wordpress.com/tag/ … as if the user weren’t able to do that themselves). A much better solution would be actual search results — for example if the user searched for “online” the SERP would list actually used tags like “online banking”, “online marketing”, “online gambling” or whatever.

Another hack I have thought of seems a little more involved, but I think it must also be quite simple & straightforward. The idea is to enhace tag pages to include not only the correspondingly tagged posts, but also to include related tags. What I mean is that a tag could be considered related to another tag insofar as both tags appear on the same posts (and the more posts both tags commonly appear on, the closer the relationship). Some additional number-crunching might be useful, but that is the basic idea.

I have several more ideas, too … but here & now I want to mainly focus on how to organize such a distributed style of hacking. I am kind of new to this, so perhaps I am missing something rather important — and I would be happy if people could help me (and others — each other, or whatever) out. Also, I do not consider myself well-versed in php, and my “coding chops” in general are quite insignificant.

I hope people will enjoy the idea of brainstorming ahead of the conference — maybe something like that has already been done before? Please, support such collaboration either by contributing your own ideas or feedback … or by simply sharing the idea to brainstorm more ideas!

Thanks for your interest! 😀