APSearch — Arabic & Persian Search

WordPress search fails on Arabic-script languages, and it fails silently. A visitor searches کتابها and gets nothing, because the post says کتاب‌ها with a zero-width non-joiner. Someone types كتاب with an Arabic Kaf while the content uses the Persian ک. A product title carries diacritics; the query does not. Every one of these is a lost search, a lost reader, and in a shop, a lost sale.

This plugin fixes it by keeping a normalized copy of your searchable text and matching queries against that copy.

What it normalizes

• Yeh family: ي, ى, ئ, ے, ې → ی
• Kaf family: ك, ڪ → ک
• Alef family: أ, إ, آ, ٱ → ا
• Heh family: ة, ۀ, ہ, ھ → ه
• Diacritics (harakat), Quranic marks and kashida/tatweel are ignored
• Arabic-Indic (٠-٩) and Extended Arabic-Indic (۰-۹) digits become 0-9
• Zero-width non-joiner (ZWNJ / نیم‌فاصله) and other invisible marks are ignored
• Punctuation and repeated whitespace are ignored

Works with

• The built-in search form and search results page
• Any theme or block that runs a WP_Query search
• WooCommerce product search (enable the product post type in settings)
• WP-CLI: wp apsearch reindex, wp apsearch status, wp apsearch normalize "متن"

Privacy

The plugin sends nothing anywhere. It stores one normalized text field per post in your own database.