Website Shows Results but Admin doesnt

Just debug it more, I suppose? This should ensure the products are in the right order, so either 1) they’re not put in the right bin to begin with, or 2) something changes the order afterwards.

If you check what is inside $exact_match before the array_merge(), do you have anything in it?

Yeah I managed to figure out what is happening. $hits[1] contains the search result after it’s been “filtered” by Relevanssi. So it will remove dashes, etc according to the settings. It will also turn the search term into lowercase, which means its not a match to $_post->post_title anymore.

So, I either need to “modify” each $_post->post_title through the same process to the same format. Is there a function that converts the search terms to the specified format?

Situation now:
Search Term: Day of the Tentacle (PC)
$hits[1] contains: day of the tentacle (pc)
$_post->post_title contains: Day of the Tentacle (PC)

Converting all to lowercase is easy enough, but what if it is Day-Of.The-Tentacle (pc). $hits[1] will then still contain day of the tentacle (pc) but $_post->post_title would contain day-of.the-tentacle (pc) and still not match.

Is there a way to convert each $_post->post_title to the same format? Or get access to the original search term? Or to ignore all dashes, dots and uppercase letters?

2. Another unintended side-effect: Admin search now also puts out of stock all the way at the back. Can I set it so it only applies the relevanssi_hits_filter on public searches?

1. You can get the raw, unfiltered search query from get_search_query().

2. You can check for is_admin() and if that’s true, return $hits untouched.

Thank you (again). I’ve done some modifications. Now, the results will only show for public (non-admin) searches using the is_admin() function. It will also do a case-insensitive substring check to see if the search term is in the title (I’m not accounting for words spread through the product title, as it would be quite labor intensive) and I also check whether there’s in stock matches first.

This way, you will get:
First part of the results: in stock and matching search term
Second part of the results: out of stock and matching search term
Third part of the results: everthing else
Last part of the results: out of stock

Sharing the code here in case someone else can benefit from it:

add_filter( 'relevanssi_hits_filter', 'rlv_bucket_sorting' );
function rlv_bucket_sorting ( $hits )  {
  if (is_admin()) return $hits;
  $original_search = get_search_query();
  $out_of_stock	= array();
  $everything_else = array();
  $exact_match_stock = array();
  $exact_match_nostock = array();
  foreach ( $hits[0] as $_post ) {
    $post_object = relevanssi_get_an_object( $_post )['object'];
    $product = wc_get_product( $post_object );
    if ((! $product->is_in_stock()) && (stristr($_post->post_title, $original_search) == TRUE)) {
      array_push($exact_match_nostock, $_post);
    } elseif (( $product->is_in_stock()) && (stristr($_post->post_title, $original_search) == TRUE)) {
      array_push($exact_match_stock, $_post);
    } elseif ($product->is_in_stock()) {
	array_push($everything_else, $_post);
    } else {
      array_push($out_of_stock, $_post);
    }
  }
  $hits[0] = array_merge( $exact_match_stock, $exact_match_nostock, $everything_else, $out_of_stock );
  return $hits;
}

Thanks again for sticking with me and my continuous questions!