Multiple Search Results Pages within One WordPress Site

Posted by Rob Barrett on May 13, 2009 in Tutorial, Web Design, WordPress • 21 Comments

On a client site I’m currently developing in WordPress, I’m having to add the client’s existing articles to the new site, as well as his old blog. I wanted them to both exist as Posts, but to be separated within the site. Most of that was straightforward – by assigning articles and blog posts to their own Post Categories, I was able to only include, say, Posts from ‘Category #1′ on the Articles page, and Posts from ‘Category #2′ on the blog page.

Where I came a little unstuck was the Search feature in WordPress. No matter which page I searched from, I would be given the relevant results from all Posts, not just the Category in question. So here’s how I went about fixing that…

Firstly, I added the following Search form to my sidebar:

<form id="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>/" method="get">
<input id="s" maxlength="96" name="s" size="18" type="text" value="Search" />
<input name="site_section" type="hidden" value="blog" />
<input id="searchsubmit" class="hidden" type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Note the third line, with the hidden input (that’s the third line if you paste that into a code editor, not what shows up here). On the sidebar for the blog, I gave that input field a value of ‘blog’; for the sidebar on the articles page, I gave it a value of — yeah, you guessed it — ‘articles’.

Then, create a file named ‘search.php’, and paste the following into it:

/* Template Name: Search Results */
$search_refer = $_GET["site_section"];
if ($search_refer == 'blog') { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/blog-index.php'); }
elseif ($search_refer == 'articles') { load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/articles-index.php'); };

The important part here is, again, the third line. This looks up the value of the hidden input on the search form, and assigns it to the variable, ‘$search_refer’.

After that, the if statement decides, depending on the value of ‘$search_refer’, which template to load. The load_template function will ensure that the referenced page is shown, displaying the results from the search term.

One last thing you’ll need to do is edit the Post index. In this example, I’ll show you what was added to ‘blog-index.php’. This goes directly before The Loop.

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
query_posts("s=$s&paged=$paged&cat=4");
endif;

For now, I’m going to admit ignorance about the second line (and if you can explain it, then please, go ahead!). I don’t fully understand what purpose it serves — I pieced this solution together from a few places — but the third line (what’s with that?!) has the important bit you need to pay attention to.

On this client’s site, the ‘Blog’ Category has an ID number of ’4′; that’s why the ‘query_posts’ function has ‘cat=4′ at the end — this only includes Posts from that Category in the output.

On the ‘articles-index.php’ template page, ‘query_posts’ has ‘cat=3′, to only show ‘Articles’ Posts. Fairly straightforward, right?

In this particular example (and I thought it best to show it as closely to my working version as is clear), I’ve sent the different results to different template pages because those templates differ to a large degree. However, if your search results templates for the different sections are identical (or nearly), then you could skip out the ‘search.php’ file, and this to your index file:

if( is_search() ) :
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
if ($search_refer == 'blog') { query_posts("s=$s&paged=$paged&cat=4"); }
elseif ($search_refer == 'articles') { query_posts("s=$s&paged=$paged&cat=3"); };
endif;

That should do the whole lot after the search form in one step! If you’ve come up with a more elegant solution to this, or know a more efficient way to implement this solution, then please leave a comment — we all benefit from sharing tips like these!

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