Add a Category Select Dropdown Box to Search Form

One of the most popular ways to integrate search is to allow visitors to control the results pool on their own. This usually comes in the form of allowing them to choose a specific Category from a dropdown (select box) to go along with their search.

This article will explain how you can accomplish three different approaches to adding a Category dropdown to your search form.

1. Build your own search form with a Categories dropdown
2. Customize the Shortcodes Extension to include a Categories dropdown
3. Customize the default search form to include a Categories select dropdown

Building your own search form

Building your own search form involves editing your theme files to include the input fields and buttons we want to include. At a most basic level you can add the following to your theme template file where you would like the form to appear:

Based on the default search form provided by WordPress, this form outputs a field for the search query, a select box containing all of your Categories, and a button to trigger the search. Note the arguments passed to wp_dropdown_categories() that define the ‘Any Category’ label and set the name of the dropdown as swp_category_limiter.

With your form in place, the last step is to tell SearchWP to take the submitted dropdown value into consideration when performing searches. To do that we’re going to use a Mod. We’re going to use the category ID submitted in the dropdown to limit our search results pool to the chosen category.

Note: notice that the variable we’re looking for was the one we used to set the name of the select which was output by wp_dropdown_categories()

All hooks should be added to your custom SearchWP Customizations Plugin.

This snippet checks to make sure that a non-empty value was chosen from the dropdown. If so, our Mod is built and added to the Query.

Use SearchWP’s Shortcodes Extension

SearchWP’s Shortcodes Extension allows you to easily output search forms and control search results pages using WordPress Shortcodes. Here is an example search form that includes a Categories dropdown to choose from:

All hooks should be added to your custom SearchWP Customizations Plugin.

That takes care of our search form, it will automatically include a dropdown of our Categories between the search field and the submit button. Note that in this snippet we have customized the name of the dropdown to be swp_category_limiter, which we will be using next.

So far we have only set up the form to output a dropdown that will let the visitor define a category for results restriction, we still need to grab that information when the form is submitted and tell SearchWP about it.

To do that we’re going to use a Mod. We’re going to use the category ID submitted in the dropdown to limit our search results pool to the chosen category.

Note: notice that the variable we’re looking for was the one we used to set the name of the select which was output by wp_dropdown_categories()

All hooks should be added to your custom SearchWP Customizations Plugin.

This snippet checks to make sure that a non-empty value was chosen from the dropdown. If so, our Mod is built and added to the Query.

Modify the default search form to include a Categories dropdown

WordPress allows us to filter the default search form found in many themes. It’s generated by a call to get_search_form() which can be completely customized either by including a file named searchform.php in your theme directory, or via the get_search_form filter. For this example we will be using the get_search_form filter. To use this filter you will be working in your theme’s functions.php file.

To include a Categories dropdown in your site’s default search form, use the following snippet:

All hooks should be added to your custom SearchWP Customizations Plugin.

The form code used here is based on the default search form that ships with WordPress. There is a chance your theme previously customized the form, and you simply want to add the dropdown to it. You can simply modify the form code to match what shipped with your theme and adding lines 11-18 from that code sample where you want your Categories dropdown to appear.

This snippet only modifies the search form, we still need to capture the value from the dropdown and tell SearchWP to limit results to a specific Category.

To do that we’re going to use a Mod. We’re going to use the category ID submitted in the dropdown to limit our search results pool to the chosen category.

Note: notice that the variable we’re looking for was the one we used to set the name of the select which was output by wp_dropdown_categories()

All hooks should be added to your custom SearchWP Customizations Plugin.

This snippet checks to make sure that a non-empty value was chosen from the dropdown. If so, our Mod is built and added to the Query.