What happened?

Pull request #44554 proposed a way to exclude among others searches for authors. This is helpful for websites providing one-way information (e.g. authority or expert websites) in contrast to collaboration websites. It may also be helpful for data privacy reasons to not disclose information about the author of an article.

I am running Joomla 5.4.8, so I am not aware to what extend #44554 has been implemented under Joomla 6.x. Under Joomla 5.4.8, the option to exclude searches for "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors" is not included with the plugin "Smart Search - Content".

So, under J5.4.8 I can search for "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors" and have all matching articles displayed. This is also a bit confusing for visitors, if the information about the author is deliberately not included with the matching articles. They get search results with articles that have no search pattern highlighted.

Version

5.4

Expected result

I am looking for an option to exclude "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors" from searches.

As a workaround I have commented out the following lines in plugins > finder > content > src > Extension > Content.php:

% diff Content.php.org Content.php
324,326c324,326
<         $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'metaauthor');
<         $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'author');
<         $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'created_by_alias');
---
> //        $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'metaauthor');
> //        $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'author');
> //        $item->addInstruction(Indexer::META_CONTEXT, 'created_by_alias');

After indexing, this modification excludes "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors" from searches.

Actual result

Currently, I can enter "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors" into the search field and search for all articles created by any of these "authors", "created_by_alias" or "metaauthors".

Since I have configured my Joomla website not to show the names of "authors", "created_by_alias" and "metaauthors", it results in quite a number of search results without any search pattern highlighted in the matching articles.

System Information

Hope this is sufficient for the purpose of this report.

=============
System Information

version: Joomla! 5.4.8 Stable [ Kutegemea ] 18-August-2026 16:00 GMT
compatpluginenabled: true
compatpluginparameters:
phpversion: 8.4.24
php: Linux infong444 4.4.400-icpu-108 #2 SMP Wed Feb 11 11:51:01 UTC 2026 x86_64
dbserver: mysql
dbversion: 8.0.36
dbcollation: utf8mb4_general_ci
dbconnectioncollation: utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci
dbconnectionencryption:
dbconnencryptsupported: true
server: Apache
sapi_name: cgi-fcgi
useragent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0

=============
PHP Settings

memory_limit: -1
upload_max_filesize: 64M
post_max_size: 64M
display_errors: false
short_open_tag: true
file_uploads: true
output_buffering: false
open_basedir:
session.save_path: xxxxxx
session.auto_start: 0
disable_functions:
xml: true
zlib: true
zip: true
mbstring: true
fileinfo: true
gd: true
iconv: true
intl: true
max_input_vars: 5000

Additional Comments

Here is my Smart Search configuration.