searching the collapsed parts of a page

Perhaps I should elaborate more on what I have in mind. Discovering Collapse-O-Matic got me thinking about structuring my website content differently.

My original goal was to present content in a general, outline form, and have links that would “drill down” to more and more specific and detailed content. But having links that jump to new pages/tabs are jarring to the reader and are prone to having readers lose their way in my content when multiple tabs are opened. Upon discovering Collapse-O-Matic, a realized that I liked the “lovely jQuery expanding and collapsing div” for revealing the additional content.

So I thought I’d put ALL of my content in one WP page, and have many layers of nested content in collapsible containers.

But then I realized that searching for content would be a problem. The browser’s find-on-page function wouldn’t work with collapsed content, and search engine hits would direct viewers to fully collapsed pages with no indication of where to go to find the info they sought.

Current thoughts…

Maybe the solution is to put each successive level of information in separate pages, but somehow get Collapse-O-Matic to load the external page content upon clicking the trigger. That way, search engines would direct the readers to the appropriate external page when searching content. (But that still doesn’t address the browser’s “find on page” function.)

So I guess my new question is: how do I link the trigger content to load external content from another WordPress page, and display it as the content of the expand block when the target is clicked?

Is there any way to improve the reader’s use of “find on page” in this scenario?

Upon further searching, I found this:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/need-expandall-when-is_search?replies=13

Is this a feature of the pro version? Will expand_on=”search_highlight” automatically expand the containers with terms matching a google search?

ctrl-f is a browser function, not associated with WordPress. It will simply search the page for the text you are looking for. WordPress can not magically expand only the elements that contain matching text based on a browser text search.

Both Collapse-O-Matic and Collapse-Pro-Matic are search friendly for both Search Engines and internal WordPress searches. The feature that Collapse-Pro-Matic adds is a new attribute called expand_on that accepts a comma separated list of WordPress Conditional Tags that will auto-expand the element if true. This feature is fully explained and demonstrated here: https://spacedonkey.de/1452/collapse-pro-matic-expand_on-attribute/

As for your question:

how do I link the trigger content to load external content from another WordPress page, and display it as the content of the expand block when the target is clicked?

This would require some kind of ajax dynamic content request that is beyond the scope of this plugin.

Thanks, Baden, for your thoughtful response! I appreciate the level of support you give this plugin.

I guess I’ll have to approach the problem from a different angle. My main concern is having someone follow a google hit to my page, only to find that the matched terms are buried deep inside one of my collapsed fields.

Here is another approach that I’d like to try. If I were to put a link on the page that would expand all collapsed blocks, the reader could then do an in-browser ctrl-f to locate the search terms. It wouldn’t be pretty, but I guess it would do the job.

You mentioned that

Both Collapse-O-Matic and Collapse-Pro-Matic are search friendly for both Search Engines and internal WordPress searches.

What do you mean by an “internal WordPress search”?

By internal WordPress search, I mean using the native searching functions of WordPress.

There are expand/collapse all triggers you can use, but surely there must be a more elegant solution for what you want to accomplish. The tricky thing is it sounds like you are working with a single page that has many collapse elements.

you can use an url anchor to automatically expand a section by the expand id, for example click on https://plugins.twinpictures.de/plugins/collapse-o-matic/documentation/#kraftwerk will automatically scroll and open that specific post. Still not exactly what you are looking for, but in the right direction, I think.