Although not a major version change this update is our largest yet (aside from the 2.0 upgrade) and brings about some highly sought after features.

Notable New Features:

Post Meta Field Improvements

Synced/Auto Populated

Post Meta fields are now auto populated / synced. For choice fields this means you no longer have to manually enter the possible options previously, as you create new values, the field updates to show these options.  Manual entry is still available.

With number fields, upper and lower values can be auto detected according to the upper and lower limits used.

Better integration with Advanced Custom Fields

With the post meta fields being synced, we’ve also integrated this with the ACF plugin. If the ACF option is set, Search & Filter will retrieve the possible fields & labels directly from ACF.

Number Formatting

Thousands and decimal options have been integrated with Post Meta number fields.

Compare Mode

For Number and Date fields, there are 2 new compare modes for ranges – lending themselves to bookings systems and events based systems.

Global Settings Page

We’ve added a global settings option under the Search & Filter menu.  This allows for changing of settings that are used across all search forms.

Cache – building the cache initially can be pretty resource intensive and time consuming.  There are new options to control the speed of the initial build & rebuild of the cache – choose a slow setting on shared environments or when resource limits are being reached.

JavasScript – lazy loading JS is now optional, as well as the option to load jQuery i18n files – required for automatically translating the date pickers used in S&F.

WCAG 2.0 Compliant

There has been a complete rewrite of how all input fields are displayed throughout your search forms.  The output of the html has been preserved in almost all circumstances except for the following:

Labels have been added to Search and Select fields, as well as the option (via S&F ui) to add screen reader text to these elements.  These changes were necessary to achieve WCAG 2.0 compliance and brings S&F inline with WordPress standards.

Admin Improvements

There have been a ton of admin UI tweaks & improvements including better error handling (warnings & errors now correctly display on your search forms after saving), CSS / JS fixes and UI improvements, resource reduction (S&F forms were running a few resource heavy processes when being saved/udpated – this has now been reduced to have minimal footprint)

Bug Fixes

There have been 14+ bug fixes in this release.

For Developers: New filter

Changing the options & output of input fields

You can now use a WP filter to modify any input field before it is displayed.

In essence it gives you access to the field object which you can modify to change various parameters:

Check out the Gist showcasing some of the features.

Attributes: You get full access to the attributes attached to a particular field – allows for complete customisation and changing custom attributes on the fly.

Prefix & Post fix can also be updated dynamically as well as the defaults for the fields (which options are set).

Options: For fields that have multiple options, you have access to an array containing all options and labels.  This allows for dynamic creation/deletion of custom options, or to allow you to include or exclude certain options programmatically.

You can also modify the attributes attributes of each option individually!

That should just about cover the main updates…!  Check the changelog for a complete list.

Happy Filtering