Rewriting search permalink

Question

when typing "a" into my search field (/?s=a) I my search.php template is loaded and all results that match that letter are shown.

If I add this to my .htacess …

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^s=(.+)$
RewriteRule .* /searchmyblog/%1/? [R,L]

and then type "a" into my search the first result of my search is shown. So there is no search.php template shown with all the results but rather the page is redirected to "mypage.com/somecategory/amore-mio"

Why is that happening? I simply want to rewrite the normal /?s= to /search/ or any other custom url.

Any ideas on that? I found heaps of posts online, but none of them seem to be state of the art or use some weird JS-hacks that I find unnecessary.

Ideas on that?

Answer 1

WordPress doesn’t know that you want the path /searchmyblog/ as search result base. So when it sees the a it tries to find the best match – in your case a post starting with this letter.

To fix that you could modify my code for the pagination base to change the search base:

if ( ! function_exists( 't5_search_base' ) )
{
    register_activation_hook(   __FILE__ , 't5_flush_rewrite_on_init' );
    register_deactivation_hook( __FILE__ , 't5_flush_rewrite_on_init' );
    add_action( 'init', 't5_search_base' );

    function t5_search_base()
    {
        $GLOBALS['wp_rewrite']->search_base = 'searchmyblog';
    }

    function t5_flush_rewrite_on_init()
    {
        add_action( 'init', 'flush_rewrite_rules', 11 );
    }
}

Now your .htaccess should work.