Author: Captain Quirk

Sphider is multibyte capable. It has been since Sphider 3.0.0-MB. Sphider 3.0.0 only worked on installations which had the PHP mbstring module installed. Sphider 3.1.0-MB and later works on all installations, and if the mbstring module was missing, it was emulated. Obviously, if the module was present, emulation was not needed. Well, one emulated function neglected to check for mbstring and ALWAYS emulated the function. This version corrects that. The result is that if an installation has mbstring installed, searches will run faster than before.

Versions prior to Sphider 3.5.1 and SphiderLite 1.2.1 will work, but just not nearly as efficiently.

The text search feature has been updated to provide more efficiency and quicker response. Previously, a search was repeated for every page of results. This has been changed so that a particular search is performed only once. Then the appropriate subset of results is displayed for each page. This does not improve searches with only 1 page of results, but each page thereafter will see an improvement.

This release fixes problems with robots.txt files, removes obsolete database functions, and removes code deprecated in PHP 7.4 and removed in PHP 8. Barring surprises, both versions of Sphider should be PHP 8 compatible.

Maintenance releases for the PDO version of Sphider have ended and the PDO version has been removed from the general download library.

Sphider 3.4.4-MB and SphiderLite 1.1.4 have been released. These releases fix a critical bug causing the database truncate table function to fail. The PDO version was unaffected.

The Sphider 3.4.3-MB and SphiderLite 1.1.3 releases fix a number of issues which arose under PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4.  It was found that as of PHP 7.3, image indexing in Sphider MB releases had broken. This has been resolved. A couple of cleanup items were also done with each.

Sphider 2.4.3-PDO is a one time maintenance release to keep the PDO version running under PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4. It is not intended to resume development on the PDO version at this time.

Both Sphider and SphiderLite have been updated to correct code which became deprecated with the release of PHP 7.4. Functionality has remained unchanged.

This release is a very minor update. The only change is updating the jquery version used in searching.

It has been awhile since there have been any Sphider updates. Has it been abandoned?

HECK NO! There just haven’t been any complaints, so nothing to fix (that we are aware of). And we haven’t had any ideas for new features.

Basically, if it ain’t broke, we are going to “fix” it.! If there IS an issue, let us know. If you have an idea for enhancement, let us know that, too.