Need some help creating a simple, custom search form

  • I need some guidance as it relates to creating a custom search form that will be a part of a page template. What I need is the following:

    Text field that searches a specific tag
    Text field that searches another specific tag
    Text field that searches post titles in a specific category

    All three don’t need to be filled out, just one. Autocomplete would be nice, but for now I’m just trying something basic. Thanks in advance for the help!

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    Your search form can submit back to the same page template. If the template loads for a GET request, you just display the form. The form method will be POST, so any POST request means your template will show the results of a custom WP_Query.

    Some code will be required to build the correct argument array based on which form fields were supplied. For tag searches, add tag query parameters.

    Oddly, though a title search is a fairly simple SQL query, it is a bit convoluted with WP_Query. You can start with the search parameter. But this searches both the title and content columns of the posts table. To not search content, you need to hook the ‘posts_where_paged’ filter and remove the content column portion of the WHERE clause.

    You will probably need to add in other arguments to build a complete query, such as post type, status, and pagination parameters.

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