SearchWP Live Ajax Search

Relevanssi doesn’t ship with a live search or autocomplete feature that would display results as the user types the search terms. There are many other plugins that provide this functionality, but few work with Relevanssi. SearchWP Live Ajax Search is the best one that does. It’s very easy to use, most of the time just install and go (it doesn’t even have a settings page!).

Attachments

Sometimes the default settings are not good enough, though. One example is searching for attachments. By default, SearchWP Live Ajax Search doesn’t include any attachments in the search results. The post type is not a problem, but the post status is: SearchWP Live Ajax Search includes only posts with the post status publish, while attachments have a status of inherit.

This is easy to fix. Just add the following functions to your theme functions.php file:

add_filter( 'searchwp_live_search_query_args', 'fix_searchwp_query_args' );
function fix_searchwp_query_args( $args ) {
	$args['post_status'] = 'inherit,publish';
	return $args;
}

This will set the post_status parameter to include posts with inherit, allowing attachments. You can also add private to the list to include private posts for the users who are allowed to see them.

Just removing the post_status parameter will include drafts in the results. Normally drafts shouldn’t appear in searches, but since the SearchWP Live Ajax Search is an AJAX search, it is done in admin context, where drafts are allowed.

Users and taxonomy terms

In order to see users and taxonomy terms in the search results, you also need to adjust the post_type parameter so that either users are included or nothing is excluded. In most cases you can just remove the post_type parameter completely and leave the post type handling to Relevanssi:

add_filter( 'searchwp_live_search_query_args', 'fix_searchwp_query_args' );
function fix_searchwp_query_args( $args ) {
	unset( $args['post_status'] );
	unset( $args['post_type'] );
	return $args;
}

Users and taxonomy terms need you to blank out the post_status parameter, which includes drafts in the results. There’s also another problem: the default template in SearchWP Live Ajax displays the post type’s name. For users, that’s not going to work, and will show empty parentheses and cause an error message in the console.

You can fix both of these problems with a new template. Take this template and save it as searchwp-live-ajax-search/search-results.php under your theme. This will fix the post type name and will skip the drafts in the results.