Theme Directory: Frontend search misses themes with a misdetected index language, and business-model views

[obenland]

Fixes #8376.

Two query-side fixes for Theme Directory frontend search returning no results; no reindex needed for either.

1. Themes with a misdetected index language are unfindable

Themes like brandy, amsel, and shadcn are findable via the Themes API but return zero results on https://wordpress.org/themes/search/.... Directory search goes through Jetpack Classic Search, which builds its Elasticsearch query only against locale-specific analyzed subfields (title.en, content.en, etc.). WP.com's indexer detects each document's language at index time, and that detection is unreliable on short theme descriptions — roughly 1,300 published themes are currently indexed as non-English (spiking in 2026). Those documents have no .en analyzed fields at all, only .default, so they can never match.

Fix: Filter jetpack_search_query_languages to append default to the query languages. Jetpack's Query_Parser::norm_langs() maps any code not in its avail_langs list to default, so the query then also targets the .default analyzed fields, which exist on every document regardless of detected language.

The filter takes no WP_Query context, but the plugin only loads on the themes site, so no further scoping is needed.

2. Searching within the Commercial/Community views returns no results

https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/commercial/?s=shop returns zero results, while browse/commercial/ alone works. The theme_business_model taxonomy is absent from the site's Elasticsearch index (no documents carry taxonomy.theme_business_model.slug), so the term filter Jetpack builds from the tax query excludes every document.

Fix: Filter jetpack_search_should_handle_query to return false for searches carrying a theme_business_model tax query, so they fall back to the SQL search path, which already handles the tax filter correctly. This is a workaround until the taxonomy is indexed in ES; the Photo Directory already uses the same filter to opt out of Jetpack Search.

Verification

After sandboxing/deploy:

• https://wordpress.org/themes/search/brandy/, /amsel/, and /shadcn/ each return the theme.
• A control search like /photography/ still returns ~1,000 results via Jetpack (unchanged counts).
• Raw ES equivalent for fix 1: a multi_match on title.en+title.default against public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1/sites/88381900/search finds the affected themes, while title.en alone does not.
• browse/commercial/?s=shop and browse/community/?s=news return results.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_011pfhLmrkpmrMsMMwrZEKJV

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