[Shari Tresky]

I have a nonprofit mental health group and we are setting up an infomrational blog with directory of therpaists that accept Medicaid and offer sliding scale to low income clients. I want to enable people to search under 3 main categories – Problem (sub categories like anxiety, depression, trauma), Therapy Offered (subcategories like cognitive behavioral, solution focused, mindfulness training), Population Served (subcategories like children, veterans, HIV patients). In Market, can a person choose more than one category/subcategory or can each category be listed separately with its own subs and you can check subcategory under each one (e.g. trauma, mindfulness training, veteran). Or can this somehow be done in Excerpt Plus? Any other template?

Thanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Shari

If I understand correctly… may I suggest this. Create a dedicated page for each of your top level parent categories then use the enable_category_by_root_parent shortcode option along with the category shortcode option. This will let you split out your top level categories, listing only its descendant categories. See this FAQ for a how to. The FAQ is for cMap but it will work with Market too.

Does that answer your question?

[Shari Tresky]

Thanks for the information. I am trying to understand exactly what would happen in this case….Could all 3 search queries appear on the top of a directory main page and could a person select more than one category simultaneously? For example, say your child is depressed and you heard that behavior therapy is recommended for depressed children. You could do a search under type of problem for depression, children under population served, and behavior therapy under therapies offered. The search would return a list of therapists who treat children for depression using behavior therapy. Or is it just that they would have to go to the menu and chose search type to be taken to a separate page with each individual search? Basically, I am looking for a function where search results could be refined by various factors, narrowing down the results.

Shari

[Steven Zahm]

@ Shari

Ok, I see now. What you actually would need is three(?) category selects each allowing multiple sections. Right? If that is the case, sorry, but there is nothing I have available that could do this out of the box.

[Shari Tresky]

It does not have to be that complicated with multiple selects under each main category. It can be ONE subcategory under each category but all three main categories having one each. Let’s say the three main categories are 1. Problem (with subcategories such as depression, anxiety, etc.) 2. Population Served (with subs like children, adults, veterans, etc.) and 3. Location (Hilo, Puna, Kona etc.) CAn I set it up to go to the directory page and have all three category selects show up and the person can select ONE subcategory from each main category? Basically, they could, as an example, select depression AND children AND Hilo and get results that meet all three? They do not have to be able to select more than one from the same main category (e.g. depression and anxiety).

Alternately, could I use another search plugin on this page such as facetwp?

Shari

[Shari Tresky]

one more option to ask about —

if nothing else, could i have two searches simultaneously by searching categories for one thing (say type of problem) and location as a keyword search at the same time? can i relabel the search field “enter location”? or can the search field take more than one keyword separated somehow?

shari

[Steven Zahm]

@ Shari

Ok, if a single multi-select will work, all of the templates that have a category drop down will work. There’s a beta feature that can be turned on that turns the single select into a multi-select. To turn it on you would add the enable_category_multi_select option to the shortcode, like so:

[connections enable_category_multi_select="true"]

[Shari Tresky]

OK, so if I enable multiselect and there is one subcategory choesen for each dropdowm, will it narrow down the search results by people that meet all three category choices (hilo AND anxiety AND children) or will the results returned by the searches be match any of the search criteria (hilo OR anxiety OR children).

shari

[Steven Zahm]

@ Shari

It’ll still only be a single drop down but will allow a user to select many categories. For an entry to be returned as a result it would have to be assigned to all the categories that the users selects.

[Shari Tresky]

OK, I bought excerpt plus and link yesterday. One more question….

Can I use the search function with category select to return results for both? For example, use the search function for someone to enter location and category select to enter category and results returned would meet bout criteria? If So, is there a way to have the word “location” in the search box instead of search?

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