displayed and highlighted the text that contains the search phrase match<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThe first two requirements could actually be achieved with the following custom search form:<\/p>\n
\r\n\r\n<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="http:\/\/www.test.dev\/">\r\n<div>\r\n<label for="s">Search for:<\/label>\r\n<input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" \/>\r\n<input type="hidden" value="1" name="sentence" \/>\r\n<input type="hidden" value="product" name="post_type" \/>\r\n<input type="hidden" value="product_cat" name="magazines,books" \/>\r\n<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" \/>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/form>\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\nHowever, this wouldn’t help with the search listing layout and the highlighting of the search phrase, so a new page template was built and assigned to a new dedicated page.<\/p>\n
Here’s the main logic in the template:<\/p>\n\n
As you can see the form is pretty much the standard WordPress form as all the manipulation of the WP_Query<\/em> call is done via the coding where:<\/p>\n\npost_type<\/em> is set to product<\/li>\nsentence<\/em> is set to 1 to trigger phrase searching<\/li>\na taxonomy parameter is added to restrict the search to the three product categories<\/li>\n ordering is set to date and menu_order descending<\/li>\n all posts are to be returned<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIt’s important to note that there is no paging in this solution. For a custom, specific search it won’t always be necessary for pagination, especially if phrase searching is triggered.<\/p>\n
Once the WP_Query<\/em> is executed it is a matter of outputting any search results. You’ll notice that if there are no search results then a few related products are shown instead to try and keep the visitor on the page.<\/p>\nOutputting the results requires two additional functions, one to pull out the text that contains the matching search phrase and another to highlight the phrase itself.<\/p>\n\n
Highlighting the phrase is achieved just by using a simple regex expression.<\/p>\n
Pulling out the text containing the search phrase was not so easy. It was greatly aided by the fact that each product’s content used a standard approach of listing the contents in an unordered list with a header and a description but trying to find a regex to pull out the list item proved beyond me, so I resorted to string manipulation.<\/p>\n
The result, though, is pretty good:<\/p>\nSearching by phrase instead of keyword dramatically improves results<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPerfect When You Want A Second Search<\/h2>\n Custom search forms and functions are perfect for when you want to add a second search function to run alongside the main search function and have really specific requirements.<\/p>\n
In a number of scenarios, you might be able to achieve what you want by simply having a custom search form that passes the appropriate parameters to built-in in search function. You can easily test this out before embarking on building your own custom search function by adding the appropriate query variables to the standard search URL and seeing if you get the results you require.<\/p>\n
That said, coding your own search function is not that difficult and gives you access to an even greater range of parameters to control the search behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How to build your own custom WordPress search and discover some surprising WordPress search secrets on the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262394,"featured_media":191611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[186],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-126988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tutorials","tag-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262394"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126988"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206105,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126988\/revisions\/206105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126988"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=126988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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