WordPress Glossary Plugin (CMTG) - Search Glossary Terms - Configuring Functionality and Style

Searching the Glossary Items

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What is This Feature

You can enable glossary search, so that users can search glossary content. There are three methods to do so.

This guide covers these methods as well as styling options.

Example

Table of Contents

• Adding Glossary Search 
  • Method 1: Search Widget
  • Method 2: Glossary Index Search
  • Method 3: Shortcode
• Styling Glossary Search

Video Guide

Method 1) Adding a Search Widget

You can add a search widget, found in your widget section:

This will search the terms content and will return all related terms.

Method 2) Adding Glossary Index Search

You can include a search box in the Glossary Index Page. You will find this setting under Admin Dashboard → CM Tooltip Glossary → Settings → Glossary Index Page tab.

Head to the Search, Categories & Tags section and enable the option Show the search on the Glossary Index page.

Once enabled, you can configure it extensively. Below are the relevant settings for search:

It includes:

• Only show items on search? - Displays the glossary items only after search is used.
• Use Fast-live-Filter? - Learn more below.
• Category selection method - Choose between:
  • Dropdown (Categories are shown hierarchically

• Links

• Hide the Categories on the Glossary Index page - If this option is enabled, the categories will not be displayed on the Glossary Index Pages. Have a note that if you just want to hide them on the specific index page, you can use the shortcode attribute hide_categories="1".
• Show only relevant categories - Will only display categories that hold terms currently filtered.
• Disable all categories - Hides the "All Categories" button
• Save the user's last selection in the session? - If enabled, it will save the visitor's search even after they refresh the page.
• Show what elements to search selection on Glossary Index - Select this option if you want to show the selection for users on the Glossary Index page.
• Search only from - Choose between: 
  • Description
  • Title 
  • Both
• Search only for the exact term/phrase? - Search will have to match the word or phrase exactly. For example, "App" will find "App", but not "Apple".
• Optimize the search results - This option optimizes the search results by removing irrelevant posts. Note: this option is available since the version 3.9.13.
• Hide the tags on the Glossary Index Page - Disables search with tags.
• Order tags by items count? - If this option is selected the tags are ordered by the number of times given tag was assigned. Otherwise it displays the tags alphabetically.
• Show only relevant tags? - If this option is selected only the tags matching the currently displayed elements will be shown.
• Show terms with exact match selected tags (on search) - This setting affects the behavior when you select two or more tags. For example, if you select tag A and B.
  • If enabled, only terms that have tags A and B will show.
  • If disabled, even terms that have only tag A or tag B will appear.
• Redirect single search result to term page? - Takes the user directly to the term page when the search result has a single result. 
• Ignore preselected letter and show all results on glossary search? -  Choose between searching all terms or only those that start with the letter preselected in the alphabetic glossary. This option is related to "What letter should be preselected in alphabetic index" - Learn more: WordPress Glossary Plugin (CMTG) - Index - The Alphabetic Index.
• Replace equivalents with diacritics for search - When this option is enabled, the English equivalents will be replaced with diacritics, to show terms with diacritics in results. Note: this option was introduced in version 4.3.8.
• Choose an icon for Search Hint - You can add a custom one.

2.1) Glossary Index - Fast Live Filter Search

The Fast Live Filter option allows you to filter the results on the Glossary Index Page without reloading the page. 

When this option is enabled, after the user starts typing in the search box, the results will be limited to matching terms among the terms that are currently presented on the page.

How Fast Search Filter Works

Typing "te" into the Search Box will display only the terms containing these letters.

The list of terms displayed on the screen changes almost immediately, making it a very convenient way of searching through big glossaries.

Below: After adding just one more letter, the results have changed - the words "Excited" and Frustrated" were removed.

Using the Fast Live Filter doesn't stop the search functionality. After pressing "Search" the page will reload and the data will be sent to the server.

Important

Remember that this only works on the data which was sent from the server.  So it will work much better with the Client Side pagination than with the Server Side pagination, as in the latter case the data has to be obtained from the server first.

See this page to learn more

3) Using [glossary_search] Shortcode

The shortcode [glossary_search] will also produce the search bar.

Note: this shortcode is available in Pro+ and Ecommerce versions only.

Styling Glossary Search

You can also change the appearance of the search panel. 

Three Examples

All options are still in the Glossary Index Page tab, but in the Styling section.

You can change:

• Search button background-color 
• Search button background-color on hover
• Search button text color
• Search button text color on hover
• Search form width 
• Search button border
  • width
  • Style - None, solid, dotted, dash, double, groove, ridge, inset, outset
  • Color
• Search input border 
  • Width: 
  • Style - None, solid, dotted, dash, double, groove, ridge, inset, outset
  • Color
• Search button font size
• Search input font size
• Search input background-color
• Search input text color
• Search form border-radius
• Combine search input and button - Will merge both

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