Taxonomy Picker Plugin for WordPress

The Taxonomy Picker WordPress plugin includes a widget which can be displayed in any widget area on your site which shows a combination of your custom taxonomies and category. Each is shown as a dropdown so that your visitors can pick any value. Queries are built by combining these as an "and" operation. The widget also includes a free text search box.

The title of the widget is free text - just enter whatevet text of HTML you wish shown. The title you enter will be displayed within tags of class "widget-title". As of v1.8, you can also hide the text search box if you don't want it.

The widget itself can be configured to show or hide category and each custom category. Just tick the items you wish to show in the widget. The picture shows the top of the configuration panel for the widget in the WordPress admin dashboard. All your custom taxonomies will be shown in the list and available for you to pick but any can be hidden from your visitors.

As of v1.8 you can set a value for any taxonomy which will be the inital value for the widget. If the taxonomy isn't shown in the widget the value will still be passed and will be fixed so it becomes a fixed part of the final query with the reader only chosing from other taxonomies. If you scroll the section to the right, you can also set the sort order for the terms displayed for that taxonomy

On many sites you will want all categories to be available to your visitors and shown in the widget. Jus pick the "All" option. On segmented sites, you might want to select just certain categories in which case use the "Incl" option and enter a comma separated list of the category IDs you wish to show. For instance, if you have a News category you might wish to restrict the widget shown on this part of the site to query this category only.

Equally, I usually have a categeory of test posts which I wish to exclude. To do this use the "Excl" option and enter the IDs of the categories you do not want to be shown as a comma seprated list of IDs.

Pages are selected in a similar way but the idea is different: this controls where the widget is shown. If you want it to shown everywhere select All but you can also enter a list of page IDs to restrict display to certain pages. I use this to show different configurations of the widget on different parts of my site. If you need more than this you should consider using a plugin like Widget Logic.

I have started adding hooks, mostly by special request. I will probably move the documentation for these and the styling elsewhere sometime soon as this page is getting too big, but for now there is just one filter

tpicker-search-text

Use to set the text of the label for the search text. It should only be needed if you don't want it to the same as the text on the Search button (e.g. if you want to set that as Submit in the admin panel), or to override translation. It is applied immediately before application. Example:

add_filter('tpicker-search-text', 'my_tpicker_search_text');

function my_tpicker_search_text( $text ) {
    return 'Keyword Search Text';
}

If you are used to coding then you will now how to add your own custom taxonomies. The plugin will work with any you add.

As of v1.8, if you don't code then there is an option in the Admin to turn on an additional admin screen on which you can enable custom taxonomies just by ticking boxes. When saved, these will be available across your site. Hierarchical ones work like Categories; flat ones like Tags. Select the type you want.

Of course the exact name you want might not be avaialble in the pre-pack list. Chose the closest alternative and add a label of your own, which is what the user will see. For instance, I used the "writer" custom taxonomy for Photographer on one of my sites.

The admin screen for this section is very ugly at present. I will tidy it up but I wanted to get the functionality released and worry about prettfying it later.

Version 1.10.1
Add tree view and a beta widget

Version 1.9.3
Add classes to items in term list. Top items have the class 'parent'; other items 'child'.

Version 1.9.2
Add filter 'tpicker-search-text' (see above)

Version 1.9
Fix post count bug. Add stylesheet.- but I haven't had chance to get everything into the stylesheet or do documentation yet - v1.9 was released early.

I have reworked the search text to add support for accents and rework the use of spaces. There may be further enhancements I can make to improve the basic text search - I will investigate over the next few days.

Version 1.8
A major update with several additional widget options incuding the ability to hide the search box. The order of taxonomies in the widget on the front site has been changed and is now alphabetical by label (rather than slug). In the widget you can now select the sort order of the terms for each taxonomy. You can chose between label (name) and slug, or even count, and whether ascending or descending.

The bigger change is that you can now set a value for each taxonomy. If the taxonomy is displayed it will be used as the initial value. If the taxonomy is not displayed it will be transparently passed through to the final WP query and restrict the final search. It means it is now possible to restrict your widget to search entirely within a value in another taxonomy.

Version 1.7.3
Admin screen now has override text for the Search button and for the ** All ** text to aid internationalisation. The bug with two words in the search text has been fixed, along with a number of other bugs.

Version 1.5.2
The plugin now comes with an options screen in Admin which allows you to define:

1) Whether the query is remembered - if you select this option then the combox boxes will populate with the query which has just been run (so long as the widget is displayed on the results page, e.g. is in a sidebar throughout your site).

2) The text used for ** All **. This includes using the taxonomy names as an options so if your taxonomies are Size and Color then you could have All Sizes and All Colors instead of the ** All ** used by the first version.

3) Whether to show the count alongside items. This isn't recommended (yet) for very large sites as I am not caching the query. That will come in v1.6 It works just fine and should be sufficient unless you have hundreds of posts and many entries in your taxonomies. So v1.5 good for hobby sites but if you are running an online shop you might prefer to wait for v1.6 for performance reasons - try it and see.

4) There was a problem that when ** All ** was selected everywhere that it depended to display a 404 Not Found on some sites. You can now specify the URL to use "URL if no selection" to use when ** All ** is selected for all options. Pick whatever best suits your site.

NB I had problems with the upload to the WordPress repository which skipped some new files. I have pushed out minor releases to catch them. Sorry if you have been affected. If you have v1.5.2 and still have problems, please delete the plugin and re-install from the Respository.

Version 1.3
Multiple bug fixes

Version 1.3
Fixes multiple keywords in the search and accented characters

Version 1.1*
Verson 1.01 was incompatible with WP3.1. This has been fixed in version 1.1 which adds no extra functionality. That will be for the next spot release over the next week or so.

Version 1.01 - not stable with WP 3.1
Fixed a PHP warning.
Added code to make all displayed text in the widget translable

Updated 22nd August 2011

v1.10.1 adds an option to sort items into a tree view. It's not available yet for categories. I need to find a way of getting the indentation right.

It also adds a beta widget which can be turned on in the admin panel. This will remain as beta until v2.0 so that people can continue to use the fully debugged version will new code is tested and debugged. (It is a full re-write as a class, so an API will be coming too.)

This adds another sort option - Pruned Trees. Again these need the indentation sorting but it is a step in the direction of drill down. It requires hierarchical custom taxonomies (it is not yet available for categories - I will fix that soon) and suppresses items in the tree which are not presently needed so that drill down is now possible at last. Ideally it could do with some jQuery.

I am not saying this is the only way that drill down will be presented. There are a number of options and I am stil unsure which is best for my own site lat alone generally so I may add further alternatives.

I think the new widget is working but there are so many combinations of options it has not been possible to test them all. Please shout if you find a problem. The area which I know has not yet been tested is including and excluding particular categories. I am tempted to re-work that entirely and add the same functionality for all taxonomies - not sure yet.

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Version 2.1