Thanks for your question, which has come up before. The short answer is “not exactly”. Here is part of an earlier topic (advanced filtering by category and excluding a tag) with a similar question:
Why do my users have to use two different searches for documents and page/posts? Can my documents be searched in site wide search?
This is an unfortunate consequence of WordPress history and evolution. The “attachment” post type was created very early in WordPress, long before custom post types were added in version 3.0. Part of my motivation for MLA was to make attachments work more like other, more modern post types. Sadly, there is quite a lot of PHP code scattered throughout the WordPress core that hard-wires features like site-wide search and taxonomy archive pages to exclude the “attachment” post type. I have never found a practical way to address this legacy code.
That topic led to this more comprehensive topic:
Including Media Library Items in site wide global search
The best alternative I have come up with is to create a page with a search form of its own and an [mla_gallery] shortcode to display a gallery of items, e.g., PDF documents, that match the entered keywords. There is an example in the “Search Form and Gallery” section of the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab. There are also several earlier topics with variations on this approach:
Help with search functionality
list all pdf files
Add searc box to Gallery
Searchable media archive
I hope that gives you the information you need to create a solution that meets your needs. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have problems or further questions regarding a search capability for your PDF items. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.
