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How do I implement a search:simple_form -like search that is limited to specific categories? In other words, I don’t want to display a category selector like in search:advanced_form, but a single search field that is limited to specific categories. The category=“x|y|z” -parameter doesn’t work with search:simple_form, so there must be some other way, I hope. 😊

Thanks for any advice!

Ville

Not as easy as I thought?

There is nothing that says you have to provide all the options on the advanced search form to your users. So you could build one like:

{exp:search:advanced_form result_page="search/results" category="1|2|3"}
<label for="keywords">Keyword:</label>
<input type="text" name="keywords" /></p>

<input type="submit" value="Search" /></p>
{/exp:search:advanced_form}

From there, you can add in whatever other options you want to give the users. It’s been a while since I did this, so you may need to add in some of the other search options as hidden fields if you want to make sure the results page comes out a certain way or only certain options are considered. For example:

<input type="hidden" name="orderby" value="title" />
<input type="hidden" name="sort_order" value="asc" />

Thanks for that info… I was able to get it working extending that idea some. The “category” variable in the exp:search:advanced_form tag is meaningless (in this regard) because it only defines which categories are displayed on the advanced form for the user to select from. Since I’m only displaying a keyword field they’re not needed. To limit the search to specific categories I used the following:

{exp:search:advanced_form result_page="search/results"}
<?php
foreach ($cat_id_array as $cat_id)
   print "<input type='hidden' name='cat_id[]' value='" . $cat_id . "'>";
?>
<input type="text" name="keywords" id="keywords" value="" size="18" maxlength="100" />
<input type="submit" id="search-submit" value="Go!" />
{/exp:search:advanced_form}

..where the $cat_id_array is a manually maintained (they change rarely) global array that contains the categories I want to limit this search to:

global $IN;
$cat_id_array = explode(",", $IN->global_vars["cat_ids"]);

I set this in path.php so that the info can be easily accessed on various pages:

$global_vars = array(
  "cat_ids" => "12,13,15,16,20"
);