Two searchforms with different categories/posts per page

Question

For a project I'm working on, I need two different searchforms. One is a global searchform that is always visible in the header of the page, that searches everything in the website. The other one however, only appears on a news page, and I need that one to only search for and display posts in the category "news".

I use the following code in search.php in order to have two unique searchforms, which is working like intended

if(isset($_GET['search-type'])) {
    $type = $_GET['search-type'];
    if($type == 'main') {
        load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/main-search.php');
    } elseif($type == 'news') {
        load_template(TEMPLATEPATH . '/news-search.php');
   }
}

And in functions.php I have this code, which displays 5 posts per page on the search results page which is working and what I want as well

function searchfilter($query) {
    if ($query->is_search()) {
        $query->set('posts_per_page', 5);
    }
    return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'searchfilter');

However, for the second searchform, which is news-search.php, I need that one to only search in the category "news". I heard query_posts() is bad so I shouldn't be using that, but how else could I achieve this? I'm sorry if the answer is super easy or obvious, but I'm pretty new to Wordpress :) I've looked here on stackexchange and on google, but I'm having trouble putting it together to make it work. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I heard query_posts() is bad so I shouldn't be using that, but how else could I achieve this?

Yes, query_posts is bad. You heard right. You are most of the way to doing this already. You have all the parts. You just need to mix them a little.

function searchfilter($query) {
    if ($query->is_search()) {
        $query->set('posts_per_page', 5);
        if(isset($_GET['search-type'])) {
             $type = $_GET['search-type'];
             if($type == 'news') {
                 $query->set('category_name','news'); // needs to be the slug not the name
             }
        }
    }
    return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'searchfilter');