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Improved Search Results

On my high-tech marketing site, marketingeda.com, I just added an Events Calendar plugin to promote what’s happening in the Electronic Design Automation, IP and semiconductor industries. Everything worked OK, until I did my first search and found that the search results showed the Events, along with the date that the Event was published, but not scheduled:

Event date is September 9th, but it was posted on September 6, so confusing

I was using a WordPress theme called Virtue, and by default the Search results display the posted event date, not the actual event date. There isn’t an option within the Virtue theme to display the event start date, so I had to figure out how to modify the date being displayed.

The Events Calendar plugin has very detailed documentation, and I quickly located the special function to display the event date.

Next, I had to find out how to modify the Virtue theme, and the approach is called a Child Theme, where I define what needs to be changed with the Parent Theme. This allows me to update the Parent Theme (Virtue) at any time, while my edits stay in place. The developers of the Virtue theme provided me with a starter Child Theme, quite nice, thanks.

My next task was to find where in the Virtue theme that the Search result date was being defined. I downloaded the theme to my MacBook Pro computer, then did a search, finding that the search date was defined in the file templates/post-date.php, so I made and then tested my edits:

post-date.php

Now, when I do a search at marketingeda.com, it returns search results with the proper event date, instead of the publication date:

Event date now appears in Search results

Summary

WordPress is extremely flexible in how your web site appears by choosing a different Theme, and adding new features through Plugins, however there comes a time when the default results are not what you want. This is where customization comes in, and Tualatin Web is here to help you use WordPress and offer customizations for the polished look.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Daniel Payne

    November update, I’ve replaced the Virtue theme with one called Neve, but with this new theme the approach to get Event dates to appear in Search Results was different. This time I had to create a Child theme, and then code a search.php template file.

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