CUNY Academic Commons

Tsubasa Berg wants to have the "Better Search" plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search/) installed on the Commons for the bkpublicscholars.org site. I filled out the following request:

QUESTIONS FOR THE PERSON REQUESTING THE PLUGIN
•This is a request from: Tsubasa Berg (tsubasa.Berg@kbcc.cuny.edu)
•What's the name of the plugin ? Better Search - https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search/
• In a few words, what does it do? It provides better search functionality for WP content. ”Better Search replaces the default WordPress search with a better search that gives contextual results sorted by relevance.”
•How is the plugin different from what's already provided on the Commons? Don’t think there is anything currently available on the Commons like this.
•What's the potential impact? Who will use it? Tsubsa Berg will use it on the bkpublicscholars.org site and probably others when we let them know it is available.
•Who initially made the request? Tsubasa Berg
•Who is the plugin author? – Ajay - https://profiles.wordpress.org/ajay/
•Say a little bit about the release history and popularity of the plugin. How many times has it been downloaded? 30,000 + times
•When was it last updated? 6/15/2014

QUESTIONS FOR THE REVIEWING DEVELOPER [generally me]
- Maintenance: Given the data above, how likely is it that the plugin is going to be abandoned by the developer?
- Security: Scan for XSS and DB vulnerabilities [How? Is there a better way than doing it by hand? Anyone have a script that greps for things like 'echo $' and "INSERT "? I chatted a bit with Mark Jaquith in Phoenix and it sounds like he just has a list of things he searches for. Maybe we should invest in writing something.]
- Redundancy: If this plugin/theme does something that plugins/themes on the site already do, is there enough reason to put it on anyway? Maybe we should migrate users from the older plugin/theme to the new one? How hard would that be?
- Themes: What are the results of the Theme Check? Many of the 'required' warnings I don't care much about - they are wordpress.org nitpicks. But consistent calls to deprecated functions, for instance, could indicate something about the quality of the theme.