Ajax Search Pro for WordPress – version 3.5 features and changes

Ernest Marcinko Blog 2 Comments

In case you don’t know what Ajax Search Pro for WordPress plugin is about, then check it out on codecanyon or the demo page. You will love it.

This version had take much longer to release than I expected, but it’s worth it 😉

New features

  • Creating various fields (radio buttons, range sliders, dropdowns) connected with custom fields (post meta) is now possible for the frontend settings…
  • …and now it is possible to change the frontend settings layout from hover position to block position…
  • …or place it to a custom place with a shortcode
  • Priorities settings had been added to the backend for controlling result priorities
  • The search is now compatible with the Advanced Ajax Page Loader plugin

Custom field filters

This is the one that I’m the most excited about. It took me a long time to figure out the best possible way to integrate this feature, and here it is.

You can now add custom filters to the frontend search settings, that are in connection with the post meta – alias custom fields. This is good because the post meta is used to store various details, that you don’t want to show, or want to store in a different place. A good example is filtering products by price.

See the TV search demo here.

..and there is a friendly backend environment supporting this feature:

Priority Settings

This is one of the most wanted features of the plugin so far. Many users wished for better control over the search result list. With priority settings is now possible to prioritize some results over others. If you feel like some items are more relevant than the others regardless of the search phrase, then this is the tool what you are looking for.

Other minor changes

  • Moving away from TimThumb as it’s not maintained anymore – the new library used is BFI Tthumb
  • The CSS files are handled much better – concatenated in one file
  • The queries are separated by each field to show more relevant results and to speed up the search even more
  • ..and of course tons of other optimisations 😉

Demo Buy!

Comments 2

  1. Danny Damen

    Hey, this looks really great, but I was wondering if its possible to use the ajax search in order to frontend search a different mySQL database than the WP one and output the results in the WP frontend.

    If so, this is a very viable option for the project I’m working on.

    1. Ernest Marcinko Post
      Author
      Ernest Marcinko

      Hi Danny!

      It’s not possible yet. There is a concept for implementing this feature in the near future, but there are lot’s of issues, mostly regarding database security. Once these issues are solved the feature will be implemented.

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