So the time has finally come.
About a year and half after our initial release we are ready to release v2.0 to the world.
A lot has happened and a lot has changed – and the plugin has grown.. a lot.
So before we start, I would like to again mention to all existing users to read the upgrade notes before you do anything.
Demo 1 (Movies) Demo 2 (WooCommerce)
Now, on to what’s new in 2.0, here’s the recap:
Better integration with your Shop
Naturally, one of the most common uses for S&F is in your WordPress shop – to filter and browser products – and when it comes to online shops I think of my personal favourites (and the most popular) – WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (used on this site).
Now S&F has direct integration for both.
WooCommerce
This now means you can use S&F directly on your WooCommerce shop page. So create your form, set it to WooCommerce,and add the widget to your shop page – this means no more messing around with copying & duplicating templates or worrying at all about the layout of your search results – its all controlled via WooCommerce.
What we’ve also done is added full integration for Product Variations – so now your searches will also take this into account.
Easy Digital Downloads
EDD has a very nice `downloads` shortcode which is used to display your products throughout your site. Now all you have to do is add a new S&F shortcode before your downloads shortcode and it will place nice and directly with the downloads shortcodes – again, using EDDs templates to display the results with very tight integration.
On a side note, we are also pleased to announce compatibility with the Marketify theme.
Speed, Caching & Auto Count
This really is one of the most sought after features for S&F.
In WordPress, all tags, categories and taxonomy terms have a “count” number – this is WordPress’ internal count of the number of posts in each tag/category/term.
Previously when displaying your search forms you could opt to show this number after each term, ie – `Shoes (13)`
However this was as static number pulled from WordPress’ internal count. With 2.0, these numbers are dynamic and will reflect your current search.
So say you had a taxonomy Colours and a taxonomy Clothes.
If you select the colour blue, the filters for the clothes will reduce down (and the count numbers updated) showing you which clothes and how many are blue – so your users can make smarter choices when filtering (demo coming soon).
I’ve seen a lot of other plugins try to do the same thing, and I had implemented this some time ago in this plugin, but as I’ve noticed – it just wasn’t scalable – once you start to get large databases or too many options in the search form the queries would become really expensive and slow…
Cue the Cache
To make all this possible and super fast we’ve built a unique caching system. This indexes all taxonomies and post meta data, so now you can have count numbers for your post meta fields as well as taxonomies all while keeping things running fast (even post meta queries are lightning fast).
Testing was done roughly using 4 filters (with a combined 20 options) & 2000 posts – and the results have been great. There are plans to start testing on larger DBs and see if we can improve performance even more.
Active Query
How do you get what a user has searched for, or what filters they have selected? There is a new class dedicated to this, and displaying the output of this nicely.
So now you can list what a user has searched for or even add it to the titles of your pages.
New Docs
Last but not least – we’ve rewritten all our documentation – its a lot more comprehensive with a lot more still to come 🙂
Scott
Does your Search & Filter Pro integrate with ElasticPress? Currently have EP set up and running and would like to add filter/sort methods.
Thanks,
Ross
We’re working on v3 of the plugin, which is a major release. After that, all eyes on elasticpress 🙂 But that will be some time away yet.
Thanks
Sofia
Hi,
I was wondering if it’s possible to change the dropdown name. It says “Alla taggar” (all tags) right now. Is it possible to change to something else? Thank you.
Ross
Hi Sofia
If you are on the free version, check the option `all_items_labels` – http://docs.designsandcode.com/search-filter/#options – otherwise, in Pro, this is an option in the admin screen – if on pro, you can open a support ticket and we can better assist you – designsandcode.com/forums/forum/search-filter-pro/support/ Thanks
Chris Robinson
Looking for a search engine that can not only index the wordpress site but also index a couple of external repositories (Vimeo, dropbox) as we reference resources through the Academy plugin. If not, what options are there for adding in additional metadata to ensure they are indexed appropriately and the links to the media can be displayed?
Ross
I’m afraid S&F doesn’t index external repositories – only posts, and their associated data in WP.
Thanks
Landing Page Design
Thank you guys for all the work that went into this plugin. It works so well. The speed is amazing. Please continue to keep up the great work.
Bob Kruse
This is one of those plugins I wish I’d discovered years ago, and it just keeps getting better and better. Thanks for making this, guys! 🙂
Ross
Thanks Bob 🙂
Theresa
Looking at being able to do full text keyword search for Advanced Custom Fields field and is it possible to have a drop down of CPT posts from a dropdown of those that are from the Advanced Custom Fields datepicker field not the published date?
Ross
Hey there, yup I think so to both.
For the first field (drop down of CPT posts) – this would work if you were using an ACF relationship field and had assigned posts.
Datepicker works with ACF date field no problem 🙂
Best
Theresa
Sorry might need to clarify, I need to create a search of custom post type events sorted by a drop down of all months/year that have events in them using the date field used to select the date the event is on not using the datepicker as the search by date. The datepicker field is used in the admin only.
It is easy to get a drop down of months/years of the date published of events posts but instead I want it as described above.
Thanks
Matt Hanson
I have an older version of the plugin. How do I update?
Ross
Hey there, you can re download from your account – https://www.designsandcode.com/account/ 🙂
Saleh
Hello,
I have a custom date field in my products (from another plugin – FooEvents)
Can I use this plugin to filter the date?
Ross
Hey Saleh
Do you know how that plugin stores the date in WP, ie, what the format is? YYYYMMDD for example? S&F currently supports dates stored as YYYYMMDD and unix timestamp.
Best
Ivan
Hello, I need to know if I can search though attachment post type with this plugin. With the free version I can list all the categories for the attachments (I’m using another plugin to assign categories and tags to attachments). I’m using this shortcode: [searchandfilter fields=”search,category” headings=”Palabra clave,Categoría” post_types=”attachment” hide_empty=”,0″ taxonomies=”location,attachment_category,post_tag”] but I get no results when I make the search. Thanks
Ross
Yup we’ve specifically built in support to Pro for searching media / attachment post type 🙂
Ivan
So, the support to search on media / attachment is only available on the pro version, right?
Frank
Does this provide the ability to do a taxonomy range slider for Woocommerce? I see it on the Movie demo (Number of Oscars) but not the Woocommerce one.
Ross
The range slider is only available for post meta – post meta is typically used form numerical values whereas Taxonomies are not…
You can easily add new post meta to your WooCommerce products so this hsould be possible, but not taxonomies which are numerical based.
Thanks
gea
Hola, que bueno está. Me interesa para filtrar productos, pero no usaré woocomerce es mas bien un catálogo, podrá adaptarse? Es compatible con WPLM ? Gracias
Ross
Si! (sorry for the late reply, realised there are a few comments which have been missed)
Salvatore
Is search per meta_key supported in this version?
Ross
Hey Salvatore, I’m not sure I follow you exactly? You can use a meta key or custom field and create dropdowns in S&F with those. So you can create many fields based on different post meta keys – I’m hoping this is what you mean. Thanks
Salvatore
Exactly that, thanks very much.
Sylvia
Does the search & filter pro 2.0 can search by sub category?
Ross
Do you mean a seperate dropdown (drill down)? In this case not yet, but the next version this will be ready 🙂
Ashley Nohay
Hi, is the sub category already implemented?
Ross
I’m afraid not, its being built as we speak for our V3 release.
Uththama Gamage
Hi, Rose.
I wish to buy the search & filter pro 2.0 developer license.
Do the developer license includes:
1. life time updates?
2. Multi site Support
Ross
Hi there
It includes 1 year of support & updates and yes multisite support
Thanks
Vinay Nihalani
The caching is breaking down my site.
How do I disable the Cache / indexing?
Ross
Please open a ticket here: https://www.designsandcode.com/support/