This is the official support thread for the Soundex Search addon, found at https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=2380 and a GitHub repository is linked from there.

The addon adds SOUNDEX (https://mariadb.com/kb/en/soundex/) matching to the normal customer facing Search function, normally available from the header of the site. This means that if you have a product called "Wonderfudge bracelets" and a customer types "wanderfudge" into the search bar, they will still find your product.

One big catch of this addon is that it relies on Stored Procedures and Triggers to maintain its lookup data, so if your database user does not have privileges to create these entities, for example you're on a restrictive shared hosting environment, then the install will fail. It tries to test these privileges before taking any actions and should warn you with sensible error messages.

v1.0.1 released today to fix minor issues with procedure names. Developed against Zen Cart 1.5.8 and later, though the readme describes how it can be made to work with earlier Zen Cart versions. Note: I haven't actually tested it much on earlier versions so your mileage may vary! Written using PHP 8.x and MariaDB 10.5 but should be compatible with earlier versions. If anyone can raise a useful bug report here against earlier versions, I can look at fixing compatibility.