NAEP SearchWP Customizations
Meet the client
The National Association of Environment Professionals was established in 1977 as a response to the increasing need for greater networking among environmental professionals and to establish a unified ethical code for these professionals to uphold. Today, NAEP continues to provide professionals within the industry, government, academia, and the private sector, to network with other members and gain access to newsletters, reports, quarterly journals, job opportunities, and more.
The Big Problem
NAEP wanted to provide their members with a tool for searching environmental documents the website has archived. They had set up SearchWP and a search page, starting to implement filtering the documents by a few parameters, but it was not working properly. The goal for this project was to prove the document searching concept and provide some base functionality to perform environmental research.
Our Solution
The main thing we tackled was the search results template that shows up when someone performs a search. We changed the template that sets the display of each search result item in a list of search results. That template had a bunch of information that we really didn’t care much about, and each result linked to a WordPress media page about the research document. To improve the user experience, we changed those links to go directly to the research document file, shortcutting the path to the end resource.
The client wanted us to pass along the user’s original search term as part of the document url so those users with specific browsers and Adobe’s pdf reader installed would be able to load the document with their search keywords already highlighted.
Allowing users to filter their search by Document Categories and Publishing Sources taxonomies meant displaying some new select fields on the search form and using the searchwp_include filter provided by SearchWP to limit our search query by taxonomy terms.
Check out these sweet filters:
Results
Along with providing the users with a much smoother search experience, we also did some research into future search functionality that they could use for an even better keyword highlight implementation. We think we did a pretty great job and the client seemed to agree:
Jon was great to work with in developing our WordPress search app per my client's specification. Although I had lots of scripting experience in other areas, Jon's expertise in PHP and WordPress spared me untold hours of fumbling around. He was very receptive to my ideas for shaping the app, but he also quickly identified functional details I'd inadvertently left out. A lot of developers are highly conversant with code but not so conversant with people. Jon also has both sets of skills and so there were no miscommunications or rude surprises. In the end, we got what we wanted, for a reasonable price and without headaches. - Marc Hoffman, Poison Dart Frog Media
A big thanks to Marc from Poison Dart Frog Media for entrusting us as their partner to take on this project. We really enjoyed working with Marc and the team at NAEP and will continue to appreciate the efforts of their members to keep our beautiful world green.