What is “Super Search”?
Super Search is a Wordpress plug-in by me that allows you to add a form to your sidebar so that users can execute searches for posts within specific categories.

It works by generating a drop down list named ‘cat’ with drop down lists from an array of your sites categories. The value of the options will be the id #’s for the categories, but what your visitors will see in the options are the category names themselves.

Then, when the search is executed, the ‘cat’ variable is added to the search url, so that the search url looks like “?s=search term&cat=cat id #”, which Wordpress supports, and will filter the search to the specific category.

Features

Basically none right now. A simple plug-in by a person who knows little about php, much less about coding for the Wordpress plug-in system.

Just copy the code provided, and you will get a drop down list, a text input for the search terms, and a button that says “Go!”.

You may want to consider styling the html within the plug-in, as I can’t think of a universal style that would fit all themes.

Demo

I’m so confident my plug-in is usable, that I’m using it in my sidebar right now. Just scroll to the bottom of the left sidebar, where it says “Advanced Search”. That’s the plugin at work.

Will this plug-in slow down my Wordpress installation?

It shouldn’t. It’s just under 1kb in file size, and works off of Wordpress’ category cache, so there aren’t any extra queries involved.

Download

Super Search 0.2

How To Use

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file from above, unzip it and upload the content to the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress installation.

This plug-in has yet to have widget functionality (give me a break, I’m new to this), you will manually have to create a php widget, or add the following code into your sidebar template file:

<?php supersearch(); ?>

Please note the following code will not generate the sidebar widget title, as it may not work as nicely for some themes as it does for others.

Upcoming Features

Once I figure out how to do everything I need to do in javascript, php, and wordpress, I will attempt to add the following features to the plug-in:

• Dynamically produced 2nd drop down list if the selected parent category has child categories.
• Several CSS files for use in styling the advanced search box
• Admin settings area, mainly for easy changing of CSS styling used
• Ability to choose whether or not to have the plugin produce a 2nd drop down for child categories

Donate

Creating this plug-in is taking an incredible amount of effort on my end (learning new coding languages, debugging, optimizing), so perhaps donating is your way of saying thanks?

If you have any issues or suggestions for this plug-in, please make your point in the comments area of this post, or instead contact me directly using my contact form.

(I’m currently working to get this listed in the Wordpress plug-in directory) Done!

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