Suggest Users basing on User taxonomy

Question

My question is for getting informations or directions about how to move for a task I have to do. This is just a request for advices due to the fact I'm not an expert in wordpress development.

My task would be to create a module (widget or just a query) which suggests registered users based on categories they've subscribed (user taxonomy like profession), just after somebody else post something.

I'll do an example:

1. I post a job (form) selecting which profession it'd be dedicated for (user taxonomy);
2. After the confirmation I get a widget showing 3 suggested users, matching the profession (user taxonomy) I've selected while posting.

I've created the user taxonomy but I don't really know where to start for this task. Do you know any article or question talking about something like it? Can you drive me to what I should study for it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You cannot query users by taxonomy. You will need to rethink your system. What would I do?

• Keep the taxonomies but use these only to output choosable values - wp_dropdown_categories()
• Save the selected value AS user meta, NOT AS taxonomies - update_user_meta()
• Now you can query users by that value - WP_User_Query()

---

Example:

This code would go to the page template where your jobs are posted.

// This will check if form was submitted, it will not trigger/show on "normal" page load
if( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST' ) {

    // This will get the profession from input after form is submitted & page reloaded
    // Change "profession" to the name of that input where user can choose profession
    $submitted_profession = $_POST['profession'];

    // Arguments for user query, see more from the user query link above
    $args = array(

        // How many to return?
        'number' => 3,   

        // User meta
        'meta_query' => array(
            array(
                'key'     => 'profession',  // Name of user meta key in database
                'value'   => $submitted_profession, // We get this from form, see above
                'compare' => '=' 
            )
        )
    );

    // Query itself
    $suggested_users_query = new WP_User_Query( $args );

    // Get the results
    $users = $suggested_users_query->get_results();

    // Check if there actually are users based on that criteria 
    if ( ! empty( $users ) ) {

        // All the output how you want your users to look like goes here 

        // I wrote a small example

        echo '<ul>';

        // Loop trough each user 
        foreach ( $users as $user ) {

            // Get all the user data
            // To find all the fields you could use, search "get_userdata()" online
            $user_info = get_userdata( $user->ID );
            echo '<li>' . $user_info->first_name.' ' . $user_info->last_name . '</li>';
        }

        echo '</ul>';

    } 
    // No users with that profession
    else {

        echo 'No users with profession ' . $submitted_profession;
    }
}