Search form for Wp_user_query??!

You need to create another search form, get the text value and then you can fire your query.
Place below code where you want to display form.

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" class="searchform" action="<php echo site_url('/'); ?>">
	<div class="user-form">
		<label class="screen-reader-text" for="s">Search for:</label>
		<input type="text" value="<?php echo get_search_query(); ?>" name="s" id="s" />
		<input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search" />
	</div>
</form>

Place this (below code) where you need to need to display in your template file.

if( $_GET['s'] ) {

	$search_term = $_GET['s'];

	----
	Execute your code here
	----
}

You can change for name, id as per your wish for better understanding.

Hi! Thank you for this code that makes a lot of sense. So I did as you said.

The form is displayed and and the query is in a template page named user-search.php linked to the page user-search in wp. But still I can not get the query to work. The page is not found. It seems I am having trouble to connect both form and query code.

What am I missing?

I am getting the following in url bar for the existing word linux for instance after hitting the search button /<php%20echo%20site_url(/);?s=linux and the page is not found.

Does the query should work on the page itself (without the form) if I use the following
/user-search/?s=linux ? Cos im getting page is not found again here.

TY

I hope Anurag doesn’t mind my jumping in, in an effort to get a quicker response back to you. There is a typo in Anurag’s form tag. Use this instead:

// added missing ? to "<php" and added user-search to path
<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" class="searchform" action="<?php echo site_url('/user-search/'); ?>">

You also should sanitize the passed search term before using it in a query, otherwise you could be subject to SQL injection attacks:

if( $_GET['s'] ) {

	$search_term = sanitize_text_field( stripslashes( $_GET['s']));

	----
	Execute your code here
	----
} else {
  echo 'Please go back and provide a search term.';
}

The else condition I added isn’t required, but it improves the user experience a little. I also added stripslashes() because some names have apostrophes (e.g. “O’Brien”), which are escaped when added to $_GET. stripslashes() unescapes them.

Hi BC,

So glad you jumped in there. I obviously didn’t see the missing ‘?’ Thank you also for the SQL warning I will do the sanitize from now on.

Well now I can say the form is working but still I am now facing a weird behaviour on the result page :/

In fact only few single letters can give me the page displaying some user …
for instance /user-search/?s=e but a complete existing word does not and I don’t even see see the else condition (no author found) ….

Here the code

if( $_GET['s'] ) {

	$search_term = sanitize_text_field( stripslashes( $_GET['s']));
	

// WP_User_Query arguments
$args = array (
    'role'       => 'author',
    'order'      => 'ASC',
    'orderby'    => 'display_name',
    'search'     => '*' . esc_attr( $search_term ) . '*',
    'meta_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'OR',
        array(
            'key'     => 'first_name',
            'value'   => $search_term,
            'compare' => 'LIKE'
        ),
        array(
            'key'     => 'last_name',
            'value'   => $search_term,
            'compare' => 'LIKE'
        ),
        array(
            'key'     => 'description',
            'value'   => $search_term,
            'compare' => 'LIKE'
        )
    )
);

// Create the WP_User_Query object
$wp_user_query = new WP_User_Query( $args );

// Get the results
$authors = $wp_user_query->get_results();

// Check for results
if ( ! empty( $authors ) ) {
    echo '<ul>';
    // loop through each author
    foreach ( $authors as $author ) {
        // get all the user's data
        $author_info = get_userdata( $author->ID );
        echo '<li>' . $author_info->nickname . ' ' . $author_info->last_name . '</li>';
                echo '<li>' . $author_info->description . '</li><br>';

    }
    echo '</ul>';
} 

else {
    echo 'No authors found';
}
	
}

Thank you so much

Thanks @bcworkz for rectifying that.

Hello everyone,

Got it to work finally.

I got rid of 'search' => '*' . esc_attr( $search_term ) . '*',
and changed the ‘s’ parameter to something else.

1Million thanks to you guys for helping me out.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by futur3int.

Happy to help (to both of you)

FYI : * is not a wildcard character in SQL, % is. In any case when using meta query’s LIKE, WP adds wildcards front and back. Adding your own causes WP to treat your wildcard as a string literal that must be matched in any meta value, so the query is unlikely to find any matches.