Implementing a Custom Search Filter in Your Plugin
Posted on 20th June 2023
WordPress Plugin Development
Creating a custom search filter for your plugin can be a great way to allow your users to find the content they’re looking for quickly and easily. In this article, we’ll show you how to implement a custom search filter in your plugin.
As you may know, the WordPress Plugin Directory is a great place to find plugins for your WordPress site. However, it can be difficult to find the right plugin for your needs.
The WordPress Plugin Directory has a search feature, but it can be difficult to find the right plugin if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
A custom search filter can be a great way to help your users find the plugin they need. In this article, we will show you how to implement a custom search filter in your plugin.
What is a Custom Search Filter?
A custom search filter is a way to allow your users to filter the search results in the WordPress Plugin Directory. For example, if you were looking for a plugin that allowed you to sell digital products, you could use a custom search filter to only show plugins that have that feature.
Implementing a Custom Search Filter
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Custom Search Filter plugin. For more information, see our article on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, you need to visit the Custom Search Filter page to configure the plugin settings.
On the Custom Search Filter page, you will see a list of all the available plugins. You need to select the plugins you want to include in the custom search filter.
In the example above, we have selected the WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads plugins.
Once you have selected the plugins you want to include, you need to click on the “Save Changes” button to save your changes.
Now that you have configured the plugin settings, you need to visit the WordPress Plugin Directory page to see the custom search filter in action.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the custom search filter is now displayed on the WordPress Plugin Directory page.
You can also see that the custom search filter only shows plugins that are compatible with the WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads plugins.
And that’s all there is to it! You have successfully implemented a custom search filter in your plugin.
We hope this article helped you learn how to implement a custom search filter in your plugin. You may also want to check out our article on how to create a custom WordPress plugin.
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As we stated in the previous article, the search filter will be based on the title field in the database. We will also be using a custom post type for this article.
If you’re not familiar with custom post types, you can learn more about them here.
Now that we have our custom post type set up, we can start creating our search filter.
The first thing we need to do is create a new file in our plugin directory called search-filter.php.
In this file, we will be adding the following code:
posts}.post_title LIKE ‘%$search%’)”;
return $search;
}
?>
This code does a few things.
First, it creates a new plugin called Search Filter.
Next, it tells WordPress to use our custom search filter function on the search results.
Lastly, it defines our custom search filter function. This function will search the database for posts that have the search term in the title field.
Now that our plugin is complete, we can activate it and start using it on our site.
To create a search filter, you will first need to create a custom post type. Custom post types can be created with the register_post_type() function.
Once you have registered your custom post type, you can then create a custom taxonomy for it. Taxonomies can be created with the register_taxonomy() function.
Once you have registered your taxonomy, you can then create a custom search form for it. The search form will need to include a search input field and a submit button.
You can then add the following code to your search form:
<?php
$terms = get_terms( 'your_taxonomy_name' );
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
echo 'slug . ‘” id=”‘ . $term->slug . ‘” value=”‘ . $term->term_id . ‘” /> ‘ . $term->name . ‘
‘;
}
?>
This code will output a search form that includes a checkbox for each term in your taxonomy. When the form is submitted, the selected terms will be used to filter the search results.
You can also add the following code to your search form to limit the search results to only those posts that have the selected terms assigned to them:
<?php
$terms = get_terms( 'your_taxonomy_name' );
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
echo 'slug . ‘” id=”‘ . $term->slug . ‘” value=”‘ . $term->term_id . ‘” /> ‘ . $term->name . ‘
‘;
}
?>
This code will limit the search results to only those posts that have the selected terms assigned to them.
You can also add the following code to your search form to limit the search results to only those posts that have the selected terms assigned to them and that are in the same taxonomy:
<?php
$terms = get_terms( 'your_taxonomy_name' );
foreach ( $terms as $term ) {
echo 'slug . ‘” id=”‘ . $term->slug . ‘” value=”‘ . $term->term_id . ‘” /> ‘ . $term->name . ‘
‘;
}
?>
This code will limit the search results to only those posts that have the selected terms assigned to them and that are in the same taxonomy.
