Archived topic
search by related terms
5 replies · Started by david on March 16, 2021
Hi, Looking for advice.
I have a site for medicinal plants, where people can search for plants used to treat a specific medical complaint, I want to present the user with a list of about 100 medical complaints treated by the plants. In the backend I will create a list of related terms for each medical complaint, so for instance if the medical complaint searched for is stomach pain then one of the related terms would be abdominal pain, so when stomach pain is selected, the results would include plants used to treat abdominal pain and any other related terms for stomach pain.
Hope this makes sense. Any suggestions how best to implement something like this much appreciated.
Thanks
Hi there,
the core WP Search function is pretty bad at doing anything more then simple content searches. Anything more advanced requires a plugin - good article here on the various options for more complex search patterns:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/12-wordpress-search-plugins-to-improve-your-site-search/
Thanks David, I'll take a look.
Would taxonomies be a way to go? Medical Complaint and related terms
Thanks
It would at least provide some hierarchy to your terms such as Parent and Child or Categories and Tags.... but i am not sure it will suit the purpose you require as they don't provide many to many relationships which sounds like the case required here.
You may need to look at a Custom Post Type solution such as PODs:
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/pods/
Or a simple Metabox relatiohips plugin:
Hi David, Thanks for this, looking at Metabox relationship plugin, also have Toolset types plugin so checking that as well.
Awesome - glad to be of help!
