How to implement custom search with input fields?

Question

I want to implement a search form like this: Loan Form

In my theme I have a custom post type called Data with the Year and Money custom fields.

I googled a lot but can't find a way to submit the user inputs to a place from where I can use WP_Query to populate the search result.

So, how to take user input from a form and use it to create a result page in WordPress?

And also please someone explain how the WordPress ?s= query works.

Answer 1

Creating custom search is not the easiest of tasks for beginners. You will need templates search.php and searchform.php - View Codex. You can then edit searchform.php and add any fields you need. When the user submits the form it will also add any extra fields you have - so your search url may look something like this /?s=1000&num=5&type=years (using the Loan Form example given in the question).

Once you have your form set up and submitting correctly you can use a hook such as pre_get_posts - View Codex combined with some Conditional Tags to test if is_search() then you can grab your extra inputs: $_GET['num'] $_GET['type'] and modify your query based on the values given.

That's the gist of it anyway.