Castlegate IT WP ACF Meta Search

This plugin is no longer maintained. The ACF Better Search plugin is now recommended instead.

Adds support for searching meta values in the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Fields can only searchable when registering custom field groups via PHP.

Usage

To enable searching for a specific field, add a new index called searchable to your field array, and set a boolean value of true. Setting searchable to false or omitting the searchable index will exclude the field from searches.

$group = [
    'key' => 'example_group',
    'title' => 'Example Group',
    'fields' => [
        [
            'key' => 'example',
            'name' => 'example',
            'type' => 'textarea',
            'searchable' => true,
        ],
    ],
];
acf_add_local_field_group($group);

Excerpts

An excerpt method exists which allows you to provide more useful excerpts based on custom field values, rather than just post content. A standard excerpt does not include custom fields, and so it may look irrelevant in the search results.

if (have_posts()) {
    while (have_posts()) {
        the_post();
        echo '<h1>' . get_the_title() . '</h3>';
        echo \Cgit\AcfMetaSearch::excerpt($post->ID, get_the_excerpt());
    }
}

Notes

When changing templates in ACF, custom field data remains for your old template's custom fields. This can have a side effect of showing irrelevant results if old data is stored but no longer displayed on the page.

License

Released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.