Book Search Demo

The Book Search page uses Site Search ONE WordPress Plugin.

It demonstrates how WordPress Custom Fields can be used to filter search results.

This demo returns all book pages by default; you could enter a search manually to narrow the search like – published contains 1591 to find all books first published in 1591, but it is generally quicker to click on the Fields Filter button (1), enter 1591 in the Year Published field, then click Apply!

The Book Search demo has several Custom Fields:

• Act (try 1, 2 or 3)
• Scene (try 1,2 or 3)
• Genre (comedies, tragedies, histories)
• Title (e.g. king will limit the search to the King Henry 6th play)
• Year Published (currently the demo plays have published years of 1591, 1594, 1597 only)
• Author (Shakespeare. Not included in the filter drop down since all the plays are by Shakespeare; a search of author contains shakespeare will return all results)
• Published (Date Range) The date the Page was published; for this demo they were made the same as the Year Published Custom Field.

Other Search Features

Stemming is on by default so that a search for officer for example will find pages with officers or office also, you can also apply stemming to a single word by appending a tilde like this  officer~  matches officer, officers, office

Synonyms uses the Wordnet Thesaurus, if you apply this option, a search on  petty will find pages with  little  or  small  for example. To apply synonyms to a single word append an ampersand (&) like this little&

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. It also useful if you are not sure of the spelling of a word, but will give a very broad search and may return unrelated words. Example #antifolas will find pages mentioning Antipholus.

How to make a Book Search page like the demo

• Add your book content to Pages, keep each page short so that they load quickly
• Enter Custom Field names and Values on each page for example Title, Author, Genre, Published (year), Act, Scene, Chapter, PageNo;
• Install the Site Search One Plugin.
• Create a Search Page called Book Search, it will use your default layout; edit it in WordPress Block Editor to add columns and put the shortcode in one column and your other content in the second column.
• Choose to index Pages.
• Select the pages to include
• Click on the Options button and select the custom fields you want to appear when the user selects the Filter option
• Select Pages > All Pages and sort by date to find the Book Search page, use Quick Edit to change the template if the default template is not suitable
• From WordPress Admin > Appearance > Menu add the Book Search page to a menu