How to create an advanced search options?

There isn’t an easy way to do this right now — the idea behind a plugin like WPSearch is that the search should be so good that you won’t need an advanced search.

What’s your site’s address? If you’re situation is very different than the average blog, I’ll see what we can do.

@kenny:

The search is good… But it seems to take results from every possible pages, including the archive pages(?). There are times when we need to restrict results to posts only, no pages, and it shouldn’t include the archives as well. Am I missing something or is there a way to do that in your plug-in, ie. to exclude pages?

Especially with WP3 where creating custom post type is possible… I am actually encountering a case where I need to restrict results to certain custom post type only. For example, I have ‘News’ and ‘Gallery’ post types. I only want the search to get results from ‘News’ only. Is this possible?

Also, I am creating a multi-language site using qTranslate plugin. Is it possible to search and get results for the currently displayed language only?

I think advanced search options (or filters), such as the above is a ‘real world’ scenario and it would be great if your plug-in support that.

Cheers!

@bedex,

That’s a really good point. I think it should be the next feature to be implemented in WPSearch.

Look for it this week — I’ll start working on it later on today.

Thanks for the suggestion!

– Kenny

@kenny,

Thanks for this plugin, looks really good.

Just to re-iterate bedex points, we have all sorts of hits showing up in searches when we just want posts, pages & custom post types.

We are getting tags, categories and the odd wierd tag-category something or other showing up.

would be great if we could lock this down to just the content.

We have index categories turned off in the settings, turning it off or on dosn’t change the results returned at all.

will

@kenny
your plugin is cool ,but lacks filtering and type suggestions.i think if you develop the next one like that of youtube it would be really usefull for filtering and categorization.
my site

as i have a lot of custom post type and taxonomies used, it would be cool if we implement a customizable search. good luck kenny….

@kenny,

I am using wpsearchmu, based on your plugin.

I have similar issues as the previous commenters, hope you can help:

1/ How can I exclude certain pages/posts from being indexed or found? I had the following code in my functions file before installing wpSearch/wpSearchMu that did the trick, but this is being ignored by wpSearch/wpSearchMu:

function SearchFilter($query) {
if ($query->is_search) {
$query->set(‘post__not_in’,array(565, 230, 703, 694, 724, 706));
}
return $query;
}
add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’,'SearchFilter’);

I’d really like to know how to get this working again. What would really be nice if you could set this per blog, because pages can have the same id’s in different blogs.

2/ I have custom post type results showing up in my search results. There is an option ‘exclude_from_search’ in the register_post_type function. This is honored by normal wp search, but ignored by wpSearch/wpSearchMu.
Do you know how to make this work or any other solution to exclude custom post types from the index or from being retrieved?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

I solved this for use in wpSearchmu:

https://welcome.totheinter.net/wpsearchmu/comment-page-5/#comment-15349

Would this post be of any use to you: https://www.skyrocketonlinemarketing.com/2010/11/09/advanced-search-in-wordpress-themes/ ?

This feature is coming along, and will be ready this week.

Thanks for the link @jcskyrocket, but WPSearch bypasses the default search, so the functions used on that page aren’t available.

Ah I see, well good luck with it!

WPSearch 2.0.2.0 should be up in the next 15 minutes.

There isn’t a very good way to do beta releases for plugins, so I could only test with my local and prod environments. Plugins that rely on the filesystem generally have a lot more to worry about in terms of server environments and portability. Let me know if any issues pop up!

Special thanks to @bedex for suggesting the new feature. Do you have a Twitter handle? I’ll give you a shout-out in my next blog post.

Hi~

a)Is there a way to highlight the search terms in the search results like google does? b) Also, the search works really well except that the blurb that comes up on the search page doesn’t show the actual snippet where the search terms were found. c) One last thing: is it possible that the thumbnails associated with the page could be visible?

Thanks, and great plugin!

@kenny:

Great! Every WP developers would definitely enjoy the new features.

Anyway, I just created a twitter account, though hasn’t been active using it… but here it is anyway: giraldimaggio

By the way, you might want to consider @beezwings suggestions as well. The feature is used in Relevanssi plugin (https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/relevanssi/), which is based from your earlier wp-search plugin.

Cheers! I look forward for the update!

What about qTranslate issue that bedex78 mentioned it? It would be awesome if the plugin was searching for the entries in the chosen locale!

Hey bedex, the next version is coming today — some bug fixes.

As for highlighting, I’ve got it working without issue currently, but I need to give it a bit more testing before it’s released publicly.

qTranslate would definitely be cool, but it would require some custom integration instructions. Additionally, WP Search tends to work best with the English language because of its word-stemmer. It’s still very possible though.

I’ll keep you posted. Look for the new version later on today ??