WordPress – Exclude from Search Results
September 26th, 2010 by moonpixel Share |

Let’s say you have a WordPress site (WP is used here more as a CMS rather than a blogging platform) where all content is created using the Pages as opposed to the Posts. However, the Posts (blog functionality) are also used, but rather for notifications, news, etc.
This is one of the cases where you might need to exclude all Posts from the site search.

So how would we do that?
There is definitely more ways on how to exclude Posts or Pages from WordPress search results, but this one is particularly simple with the use of the get_post_type() function.
In the theme’s search.php file, after the start of the loop:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

add:

<?php if (get_post_type() == 'post') continue; ?>

this would obviously be different for each theme, but the complete search.php could look like this:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn" role="main">
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<h2 class="pagetitle">Search Results</h2>
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
</div>
 
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
 
<?php if (get_post_type() == 'post') continue; ?>
 
<div <?php post_class() ?>>
<h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a>
</h3>
<small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>
<p class="postmetadata">
<?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> 
Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> 
<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
</div>
<?php else : ?>
<h2 class="center">No posts found. Try a different search?</h2>
<?php get_search_form(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

possibly you might want to exclude few of the Pages as well by listing the page IDs in an array:

<?php if (get_post_type() == 'post') continue; ?>
<?php if( in_array($post->ID, array('410','412','575','8','156') ) ) continue; ?>

That’s it. Hope this helps someone…

Tags: , , , ,

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 4:14 am and is filed under wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • bobben

    howabout in the twentyten theme? the loop is not part of the search.php

    • http://moonpixel.com/michal-miksik/ moonpixel

      In the TwentyTen wordpress theme you could put below line 124 in loop.php

      122 <?php /* How to display all other posts. */ ?>
123
124 	  <?php else : ?>
125	    <?php if (is_search() ) :  ?>
 
...and then put your code for excluding posts or pages here... 
 
            <?php endif; ?>
  • Nick

    Brilliant. This is exactly what I couldn’t achieve using Simply Exclude and another technique I found online. Perfect when themes use posts as a way to populate things like galleries, and you don’t want those showing up in search because they’re empty. Thanks!

    • http://moonpixel.com/michal-miksik/ moonpixel

      my pleasure mate

  • Daniel

    is there a way to exclude a specific div element, from search results?

    • http://moonpixel.com Moonpixel

      is that a div in post content?

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