Search Builder
Search Builder
Guide on how to set up and manage search functionality across the site.
To access search builder and start adapting it to the needs of your site you need to go to Search Builder section of the WordPress administration.
There you will find four vertical tabs that will enable you to create custom search forms for the various places on the site.
Home Page, Search Page, Detailed Search
are used to set up search forms on those places on the site while Ad Single Group Fields is used to group custom taxonomies and organise how they will be displayed on the ads single page
You can watch overview video or click on below links to find more out about each feature.
Home Page
Guide on how to set up and use search builder for displaying on the homepagefa
On the home page tab of the search builder you will be able to set up the search form that will be displayed in the main banner of your WordPress site.
You can choose to include keyword search, taxonomy and/or meta fields.
Each of those options will have its own set of settings that you can choose from and while taxonomy and meta fields have the same set of settings that are used everywhere they are available for use, keyword search can only be configured on the homepage tab.
Only Common group taxonomy and meta fields can be set up from the Home Page tab.
The most important thing to remember here is that only taxonomies that are created in the Common group of the Fields Builder are available to be chosen here. That is because this is considered as the main search for the site and it wouldn’t be good to be able to search only for a certain taxonomy that is not available for each category of the site. Let’s explain the logic behind this by an example.
If you have a classifieds site that is selling Cars, Toys, Real Estates and many more product categories and you set that on the homepage users are only available to search for the Car Models you will be greatly limiting the exposure of all the other products that your site has to offer. That’s why making available common taxonomies (taxonomies that are used by all or by the most products on the site like country or city for example) for search within the home page search form will be the logical thing to do as the customers usually will want to shorten the results by their own city.
Search Page
Guide on how to set up and use search page search form
In this tab you can set up the search form that will be displayed in the sidebar of the search page. While only on the Home Page tab you can set up keyword search for the Search Page tab it is possible to set up taxonomies that will be displayed based on the category that is selected by the user.
That is done by switching the niche tabs at the top of the search builder form.
How to switch between various niche tabs
By setting this up each taxonomy field visibility will be dependent on the category chosen by the user. So if, for example, a user selects the Car category only the taxonomies relevant to the car category will be displayed.
Niches are main site categories (groups) that are created from the Fields Builder.
Detailed Search
Guide on how to set up and use Detailed Search form.
Detailed Search form, once it is set up, will be displayed on the search page derivative that is called Detailed Search. Users can access it by clicking on the Detailed Search button.
How to access detailed search screen
If you don't see the button please make sure that Detailed Search is enabled from the theme options under the option Yo!Classifieds Options ->Theme Functionality - Detailed Search.
The most useful thing here is that you can group related taxonomies for each niche independently and that is exactly how the options will be presented to a user. It is done by creating a new group in the Field Groups section in the builder.
The created groups are sortable.
How to create field groups
Taxonomy field can be assigned to any created group by expanding it and select the group from the select field.
How to assign taxonomy field to a group
Once everything is set up properly a user should get visual experience like this.
How detailed search will look like to a user
We’ve also prepared the video tutorial that you can watch.
Ad Single Group Fields
Guide on how to set up and organise taxonomy fields on a ad single page
In order to organise the display of the taxonomy fields into the groups just like it can seen on the theme demo page you firstly need to create the groups and then assign the taxonomies to each of the groups you created.
When you click on Ad Single Group Fields tab you will find that the builder is divided into the three sections.
1.
At the top of the builder you will be able to switch between different site niches (categories)
2.
On the left will be listed all available taxonomies for the selected niche
3.
On the right will be all the groups that you’ve created for the selected niche
Common category is not editable as the fields from it will be automatically included in all niches independently.
How to manage Ad Single Group Fields
Once you’ve set everything up to your liking it should displayed to a user very similar to the view showcased in the screenshot below.
How Ad Single Group Fields will be displayed to a user
You can also watch the video tutorial that we’ve prepared for you.
Keyword Search Options
Guide on how to set up and manage keyword search options
Keyword search can only be set up from the Home Page tab. Once you’re there you will find that there are quite a few option that can affect how the keyword search will work. Let’s go over each one of them.
First three options in the builder are the ones that will define where the system will lookup for the keyword provided by the user. Available options are: Titles, Descriptions, ID’s
Keyword search query options
There is also options that enables us to if we wish to display dropdown with visible suggestions to a user or to lead it directly to the search page.
Also, we can set up what kind of the data the search will include in the results, the simple options are Author and/or Ads and within those we can manage if the dropdown search will include only items that are promoted or every find.
Author options
Choosing only Author Premium Profiles will exclude from the results all the authors that haven’t purchased Premium Profile Promotion.
Ads options
Choosing only Promoted Ads will exclude from the results all Ads that haven’t purchased Keyword Promotion Package.
Field groups options
The last of the options that we can set up to include within the results are fields groups. Those are essentially main categories of the site that you created using Field Builder. Once you enable it you will have an option to choose only specific categories to include in the search.
How to choose categories from the field groups modal
Enabling this option will allow a user performing the query to shorten the search within selected category if the keyword has been found in it.
Searching for the keyword in a specific category
In order to fully grasp all available options please watch the video tutorial that we’ve prepared for you.
Taxonomies and Meta Fields Search Options
Guide on how to set up and manage taxonomies and meta fields search options
Taxonomies or meta fields options have their own inner settings that are enabling you to set up how they will be displayed to a user. You can start setting them up by clicking on any taxonomy or meta fields box in the search builder.
The two options are the same for every field type that is possible to be created using the field builder.
Common options
Those two options are Label and Placeholder. They are allowing you to set up name and the input placeholder of every field that you have on the site for each category independently.
Search builder taxonomy and meta fields label and placeholder fields
Specific options
Also, there are a set of specific options for some of the field types that are available. If you try to edit the taxonomy that has field type input or if you try to edit the price field from the Fields Meta fields you will be able to set up the following fields.
Price – Prefix and Suffix fields
Taxonomy (input type) – Prefix, Suffix and Steps size for the range field
Prefix and Suffix
Once you set up prefix and suffix fields the field in the search form will display it before and/or after the taxonomy depending on your setup. This option enables us to set up the price sign so that it can be displayed on the frontend in the format similar to this: $100
Steps size
If you choose your taxonomy field type to be input then on the frontend search form it will be display in the form of the range field created of the values entered by the users. That has the potential to break the site if left unmanaged and to prevent that the site will use default steps size between the values, but you can override it using this field.
So, if the field in question, for example, is the car horsepower and you set the step size 10, the users will be able to choose in this format: 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 etc.
We’ve also prepared video tutorial for you.
Disabling Search Builder
Guide on how to disable the search builder
If you don’t want to use fields builder or if you want to prevent the customer you’re creating site for from changing your search builder configuration – then you can easily switch off the search builder. No one will be able to edit any of the fields that you created and all your configuration will still be in the full use on the site and its search options.
In order to disable the search builder please go to the
Yo!Classifieds Options ->Theme Setup->Theme Functionality
from wp-admin area and there you’ll find an option that allows you disabling of the search builder.
