SearchWP Live Ajax Search

Relevanssi doesn’t ship with a live search 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 ) {
	unset( $args['post_status'] );
	return $args;
}

This will remove the post_status parameter completely from the SearchWP Ajax Live Search, allowing attachments. This will also include private posts in the search results – but only if the user is allowed to see them. Relevanssi will take care of that.

Users

In order to see users 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_type'] );
	unset( $args['post_status'] );
	return $args;
}

This still leaves us with another problem: the default template in SearchWP Live Ajax includes the name of the post type. For users, that’s not going to work, and will show empty parentheses and cause an error message in the console.

That can be fixed with a new template. Take this template and save it as searchwp-live-ajax-search/search-results.php under your theme.