Customised search scope in WordPress

Sometimes in a WordPress site you might want to have the option to search within different types of content. For example, if one category contains blog posts and another one contains white papers, you might want to allow people to restrict their search query to blog posts only. Here is a slightly hacky way to achieve this.

Create a specific template for displaying search results – search.php. Then, by placing an extra field in your search forms, you can check for this value within search.php and display or hide certain categories depending on what you detect.

So for example on your homepage you might have a search form with a field like this:

<label>Restrict search to blog: <input name="scope" type="radio" value="blog" /></label>

Then within search.php you would pick up that value like this:

<?php $scope = $_GET['scope']; ?>

And then use that to skip certain categories within the loop:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
//Skip this result if it's out of scope:
<?php if($scope == 'blog' && !in_category(1)) continue; ?>
....

Of course you can make this more complex by setting up multiple scopes and including more categories in each.

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Posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 5:09 pm and filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Comments

  1. Hi there, do you have a working example of the above? sounds good.

    Bjarni at 12:27 am on 4 May 09

  2. Hi Bjarni

    I have a working example but currently on a development server only, for a client project. Guess I could make a public working version sometime when I get a moment, if you think that’s useful.

    Ben

    Ben Hayes at 10:32 am on 5 May 09

  3. i would appreciate it if you do post up a working example.

    my problem is i want to be able to custom my search to ONLY certain categories, and ONLY by certain fields (Titles) or by custom fields (actors.)

    as you may guess, i’m doing a movie review site.

    any help is appreciated, thanks

    Steven at 7:40 am on 22 May 09

  4. In that case it may be better to run a custom query on the WP database.

    I think you could still detect your various search parameters via $_GET variable. Then use those parameters to construct a custom query using $wpdb->get_results(). See http://codex.wordpress.org/Displaying_Posts_Using_a_Custom_Select_Query for more info.

    Good luck!

    Ben Hayes at 9:17 am on 22 May 09

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