How to exclude custom fields from search queries?

Question

I'm building a hotel search engine and I've first created a custom content type "hotel" with Types & Views Toolset. I'm using "Search everything" plugin to query custom fields and custom taxonomy from this custom content and I've excluded the other content types from functions.php.

For now, I have these custom fields :

title address zipcode city ...

I want to exclude "address" and "title" because some addresses or hotel names contain city names and I just want results from city queries.

Is it possible to exclude fields or to only include the city field ?

Thank very much

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you need to have post metas in your query. This is where the meta_query parameter of the WP_Query class comes to help. The meta_query is an array of arrays.

Example from the codex:

$args = array(
   'post_type' => 'my_custom_post_type',
   'meta_key' => 'age',
   'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
   'order' => 'ASC',
   'meta_query' => array(
       array(
           'key' => 'age',
           'value' => array(3, 4),
           'compare' => 'IN',
       )
   )
 );
 $query = new WP_Query($args);

Answer 2

If you like to query directly in $wpdb you could do it like this in search.php:

global $wp_query;
global $wpdb;
global $post; 
$search = sanitize_text_field( $_GET['s']);

$querystr = " 
    SELECT   wposts.ID, wpostmeta. *
    FROM $wpdb->posts AS wposts
            LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta wpostmeta ON (wposts.ID = wpostmeta.post_id)yy
    WHERE wposts.post_status = 'publish' // all published
    AND wposts.ID NOT IN ('186','184' ,'108', '124', '78', '80', '289') // exclude all these IDs
        AND wpostmeta.meta_key= '_txt_en' // Here the customField 
        AND wpostmeta.meta_value LIKE '%".$search."%'

     GROUP BY wposts.ID 
    ";





$postids = $wpdb->get_results($querystr,OBJECT);

if ($postids){ 
    foreach ($postids as $post){
        setup_postdata($post);

        echo apply_filters('the_content', get_post_meta($post->ID, '_txt_en', true));
    }

}else{
    echo "<p>Sorry, no matches.";

}


}