Modifying Search Results

  • I’m trying to set up a search and filter for artists on my website, so that people can browse through the artists who have registered on my site based on their medium, style, and country of origin. However most of the plugins I’ve looked at do not fit my needs, are prohibitively expensive on my current budget, or both. I’m hoping that someone here can point me in the right direction to either begin building something myself or find the right combination of plugins to suit the task.

    I want users to be able to filter artists by specific metadata tags (country, type of artwork, etc) and for the results to populate below the search bar without refreshing the page. I’m using Ultimate Member’s forms for creating and assigning the metadata to users for this purpose. A sorting system akin to FacetWP’s demos would be perfect, if I could afford their rates.

    Ideally I want the search results to display in a manner that is congruous with the 25 sections I’ve put onto my Artist page already, because the person I’m working with likes that style. I’d prefer it if that could be done by making a custom search result display, one which shows the featured image and the first 3-5 images from the post or user page (depending on what’s easiest or more reasonable to set up).

    Any insights at all would be helpful to solve this problem. I’d love it if this was a one-plugin solution but if I have to code something myself I’m prepared to learn. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter alkaiosmytilinis

    (@alkaiosmytilinis)

    With some advising from a friend, I’ve managed to get halfway there using Elementor, Loop Grids and Taxonomy Filters. It seems to do the job correctly for the most part, pulling articles and sorting them as I see fit within the rules of the taxonomy I generate. However, I am still faced with the problem of replicating the intended design and layout of the finished page. Are there any widgets or elements that I can use to pull images besides the featured image of an article/post?

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Sounds like the stumbling point now is getting additional pertinent images to be part of the search results? The solution partly depends on how the images relate data-wise to the associated article. If they exist as attachments to the article, then querying for them is fairly straight forward. However, they may not occur in the order they appear in the article. Some kind of ordering scheme is feasible but it’d involve extra effort.

    Depending upon the nature of these articles, the simplest solution might be to display the full article instead of a featured image and excerpt.

    It’s not a given that images are attachments to the article since images can easily be reused elsewhere. If an article includes reused images, the only way to extract them from the article is to parse the article’s content to extract the src attribute value of any img tags found. This approach is very slow and inefficient.

    Another challenge is in customizing Elementor elements to do what you want. Depending on what coding skills you have, this may not be so easy. The alternative would be to develop your own bespoke search solution. Getting related images isn’t too difficult if the data relations are there, but displaying results without reloading the page adds more complication that could be challenging for novice coders to implement.

    Thread Starter alkaiosmytilinis

    (@alkaiosmytilinis)

    I think I have a workable solution to my problem through the use of Advanced Custom Fields and GridBuilder X. GridBuilder is a little out of date to my knowledge, so the solution ended up being a little bit hacky, but by adding additional images as ACF fields and then passing those into GridBuilder X indirectly, I was able to work around the incompatibility issues I was having.

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