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I have been trying to get a simple question answered since early this afternoon. I’m not a developer, programmer, or anything – I learn what I need to know to do what I need to do, but I am up to my eye balls, and I don’t want to study this program if it isn’t capable of meeting my needs. I have been awake 72 hours and I need to know if this will do what I need it to do before I invest one more second of my time. I can’t find this most basic answer in your documentation.
Will Ajax Search Pro allow me to exclude pages and/or specific sections of what it finds from the results being returned to customers? I know that seems lie a screwy question, but I run an in-person and an online store from the same system, and while that system will allow me to hide products available only in the store from my online buyers so they can’t see them on the page, it can’t hide them from the built-in search, so if a person enters the name of the product or something close into it, they find my hidden products.
I see notes on how to hide things by category, but that means a wordpress category, and that doesn’t apply here. I’d have to be able to hide these pages by using the Ecwid category code (Ecwid is the e-commerce system), or by some kind of css, because I don’t even have access to the code for these pages, since they come to wordpress via a widget that basically plants the entire store or a specific product category where ever you put it.
I see from one of your tutorial videos that you have a very thorough front-end filtering system. What I need to do is filter things from the back end, in the most simple, plain-English way possible. Please, let me know if this is doable.
Hi!
I’m assuming the Ecwid categories are custom taxonomy terms (like product categories in WooCommerce). While I’m not familiar with that e-commerce system, excluding a category (or in this case a term) should be not much different from any other taxonomy terms.
Basically, if you want to exclude certain posts/products/custom post types that belong to certain categories (taxonomies), then you can do it on the Advanced Options -> Exclude results panel: https://i.imgur.com/NjyaQs7.png
A bit more information could be also found in the Category and term based exclusions documentation chapter.
Let me know how it goes!
Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)
Unfortunately, I can’t really figure out how this would work. The category in this case is not about a search term. The items I’m looking to restrict don’t really follow a taxonomy in the normal sense; it’s not about WHAT products they are, it’s about WHERE they are, physically. There are, for example, DINING TABLES available for sale globally, that is, online AND in the physical store. But there are also DINING TABLES that can be bought only in person, in the physical store, and these are kept in a separate category called STORE ONLY.
Restricting search for the category STORE ONLY doesn’t help because no one is searching for that. Excluding DINING TABLES eliminates my chance of selling a dining table to an online customer, and I sure don’t want to do that. So the problem I have is, I’m not trying to limit what the customer searches for. I’m trying to limit what the search engine SEES. I don’t want the search to see the STORE ONLY category at all.
Maybe it’s easier to feed the pages to be searched instead? There must be a way for me to pull them from my site map and give them to your search engine. This process is complicated by the fact that the pages are coming in through a plugin but that shouldn’t be a complete stop.
I have found one company that can do what I need, but it is an offsite search. The customer is actually take off to a page that looks like the site but is NOT my site for the search, and I’m not crazy about this. If the same thing can be accomplished here, it would be much better.
…I’m trying to limit what the search engine SEES. I don’t want the search to see the STORE ONLY category at all…
Then excluding the STORE ONLY category is the solution on the panel I mentioned earlier, in my opinion. Anything in the STORE ONLY category will be excluded from the results, the plugin won’t be able to ‘see’ it in other words.
This will not affect the search phrases, the pages or anything at all, it will only make sure that the search query done via the ajax search pro does not take anything from within that category into consideration when looking for results. Have you tried that? Or am I missunderstanding something?
I see that you wrote that the items you want to exclude does not follow any particular taxonomy, but then again you mentioned that the STORE ONLY is a category, and the items are placed there. If that is a category, then it is a taxonomy term, therefore if should be possible to use it as an exclusion. I’m sorry if I missunderstood you here.Another possibility is to exclude products (or any other custom post type), it’s on the same options panel. If you know which products you don’t want as results, you can do that as well: https://i.imgur.com/kKS6ajk.png
..or it’s also possible the other way around (telling which products allow to search), but it’s a bit more complicated, as it needs a bit of custom code, and knowing the product IDs: https://wp-dreams.com/knowledge-base/limit-results-to-specific-post-ids-only/If the items to be excluded are not tagged or categorized in any way, I would probably create a custom taxonomy with one term ‘excluded’, and place the ones to hide from the search there, then exclude that category on the search back-end. Then when adding new products, I can just simply decide to move them to that taxonomy term if I want to exclude it.
Even better, WooCommerce already has a product visibility option for each product that could be used for that, and also possible to tell the plugin to exclude those.The plugin does not see the site from the ‘front’ side as web search engines like Google or Bing do – but it queries the database tables instead. It’s greatly more efficient in a sense that it does not need any external servers to run on, it does the job directly on the server it’s installed on. This is why it’s not possible to feed pages and URLs for the plugin to follow and index, as it works from the server side.
Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)
I must be doing something wrong, because what you see in the attached screen shot is what I see when I choose “advanced options” and “exclude.” It seems I can specifically exclude by date only, and the search box searches users only.
You cannot access this content.Oh, that explains everything. Maybe an off-site crawl-type search could be the best solution for this case, as the content is not directly stored as wordpress content.
Don’t forget that the lite and the pro version are two different plugins, so the lite version shortcode is not automatically replaced with the pro version shortcodes – both have different ones. So wherever you had the lite version shortcodes, you will have to replace them with the pro ones first. The Pro version can do exactly the same as the lite version, with much more options additionally.
Best,
The reason for separating the plugins was mostly much better compatibility and safer updates, plus anyone can go back to the lite version if needed.
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)
Yes, I know they are different short codes and different plug ins. I can’t get the pro version to show up at all, however. I went back to the Lite version today, but I found it to be very sporadic. For example, it is right above a set of French rush seat chairs on the page but a search for the words “french rush” produce no results. At the same time, an out of stock, disabled product in a disabled category pops up just fine. I just disabled all search entirely.
I have previously used an offsite service called Freefind which is very good but it’s always strange when the customer goes off site for any reason. I would really prefer to find something that works on the site, but it seems as if I an trying to re-invent the wheel. I had no idea it could be so complicated!
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