BuddyDev

Brajesh Singh in 26 Comments

Many of the members asked me about integrating global unified search to WordPress Adminbar search form. Last night, I played with the code and managed to make it work.

In this post, I am going to outline the way I have done it on my setup. It's simple and just a couple of lines of code.

Since we don't want to modify the existing code for global search, all we need is redirect the search result page to our unified search result page.

The simplest way is to change the action of the adminbar search form. WordPress does not provide a hook to filter the search form action url, so we will simply remove the default sarch form and include our own search form.

Step 1: Remove the default search form

[sourcecode language="php"]

function remove_wp_adminbar_search_menu(){

//remove the search from from adminbar menu
remove_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'wp_admin_bar_search_menu', 4 );
}
add_action('init','remove_wp_adminbar_search_menu');

[/sourcecode]

Now that we have removed the search form from admin bar menu, we will need to add our own search form. The code below is simply a copy of wp_admin_bar_search_menu, with the form action url modified.

Step 2: Add our own modified search form

[sourcecode language="php"]

function custom_admin_bar_search_menu( $wp_admin_bar ) {
if ( is_admin() )
return;
//we have just changed the form url

$form = '<form action="' . esc_url( bp_search_form_action() ) . '" method="get" id="adminbarsearch">';
$form .= '<input class="adminbar-input" name="s" id="adminbar-search" tabindex="10" type="text" value="" maxlength="150" />';
$form .= '<input type="submit" class="adminbar-button" value="' . __('Search') . '"/>';
$form .= '</form>';

$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array(
'parent' => 'top-secondary',
'id' => 'search',
'title' => $form,
'meta' => array(
'class' => 'admin-bar-search',
'tabindex' => -1,
)
) );
}
add_action( 'admin_bar_menu', 'custom_admin_bar_search_menu', 4 );

[/sourcecode]

If the above code does not work, please use this gist

That's it.

You will need to put this code into functions.php of your theme and it will work.

Please do let me know if you use it and whether it works for you or not.