Algolia Support without changing Default Search

Could you go into more detail about what you’re ultimately trying to do?

I don’t want to use it for Site search but instead other custom pages.

I’m not quite following on that part specifically.

For example, off the top of my head, are you perhaps trying to have widgets and filters scoped to specific content types, or perhaps products categories with WooCommerce, where you visit the category page and see only products specific to the current cat, but you can filter/refine search within that scope?

The Search settings page is going to include search one way or another, whether it be interacting with the pre_get_posts hook for the “use with native search” option, or Instantsearch as a whole with the search field. Beyond that, there’s the Autocomplete integration with your search field, but that’s going to mostly be as-you-type recommendations based on Algolia’s educated evaluations.

Essentially we want to create an entirely custom search page using custom Gutenberg blocks.

I’m hoping to use the plugin primarily as an easy way to hook into the indexing process for a specific post_type and output a completely custom page with searchable data.

Basically using the plugin as more of a library to handle the communication and indexing within Algolia rather than specifically implementing search on my site.

Hi @nineteen88

The indexing functionality doesn’t require having either “Use Algolia with the native WordPress search template” or “Use Algolia with Instantsearch.js” enabled in order to push your content. I cleared out my local install’s wp_searchable_posts index to empty it of content, and then on the /wp-admin/admin.php?page=algolia-search-page page, I made sure “Do not use Algolia” was the chosen item, and then clicked the “Re-index All Content” button at the top and it pushed the content into the index.

This is something we haven’t changed and was part of the functionality when we forked Algolia’s original plugin. It also makes sense so that someone with a huge install and a lot of content, could get the content pushed before enabling search based changes of some sort and letting Algolia take over with a small portion of the content available.

So you should be able to get a populated index. Not quite managing to picture how you’d be pulling that information, but I suspect it may be a custom implementation on that front?

The only part I could see potentially not automatically working, would be updating individual posts where out of box, at least when a search option is chosen, it’ll self regulate individual items in the index. For that you’d need to automate or routinely process via bulk re-indexing.

The indexing functionality doesn’t require having either “Use Algolia with the native WordPress search template” or “Use Algolia with Instantsearch.js” enabled in order to push your content.

Thanks for that, yes it looks like we may need to think about the self-regulating of individual items, I was hoping this would still work regardless of the option but I can read through how the plugin is doing it and mimic it’s behaviour within my plugin.

So you should be able to get a populated index. Not quite managing to picture how you’d be pulling that information, but I suspect it may be a custom implementation on that front?

Yeah it’s totally going to be custom with markup and implementation as it is based on what has been done on another non WordPress site.

Thanks for your help in this.

Welcome.