Customize Templates

Customize templates from your theme

Ship custom templates for Algolia Search with your theme. layout: page.html

Introduction

The WP Search with Algolia plugin provides users with a default look & feel for the 2 main features of the plugin which are the autocomplete drop-down and the instant search page. However, as a theme author you might want to customize the appearance of the search experiences so that they fit into your theme.

To do so, you can add template files to your theme as explained in:

• The customization of the autocomplete dropdown
• The customization of the instant search page

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If you are not the author of the theme you are using, we recommend you create a child theme so that you don't loose your changes after updating the theme.

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Default location of template files

By default, the plugin will look for the template files in your theme in different locations by order of priority:

1. In the root folder of your theme, e.g. wp-content/themes/yourtheme/autocomplete.php
2. In a folder named algolia, e.g. wp-content/themes/yourtheme/algolia/autocomplete.php
3. In a custom defined directory as explained in the Customize template folder name section
4. At custom locations as explained in Customize template names and location
5. In the plugin's templates folder if none of the preceeding matched.

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The first matching template found will be used. Even if you defined a custom directory as is explained in the next section, if a template is found in wp-content/themes/yourtheme/algolia/*, then the later template would be used.

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Customize templates folder name

The plugin provides a filter called algolia_templates_path which allows you to customize the name of the folder where the plugin will look for templates.

Here is an example that lets you place your template files for customizing the Algolia Search experiences in a folder named partials/ instead of algolia/.

<?php
// functions.php in your theme's root directory.

add_filter( 'algolia_templates_path', function() {
    return 'partials/';
} );

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Be sure you don't omit the trailing slash.

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You can now place your algolia template inside of the partials folder.

The plugin will try to load:

• wp-content/themes/yourtheme/partials/autocomplete.php
• wp-content/themes/yourtheme/partials/instantsearch.php

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If one of the template is not present in the folder, it will fallback to the template shipped with the plugin only for that one, still loading your custom version for the other.

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Customize template names and location

In the previous section you learned how to customize the folder where the plugin will try to load the templates from.

As a theme author, maybe you are respecting some kind of naming convention, and would also like to change the template names in addition to their location.

The plugin provides a filter hook called algolia_template_locations that allows you to suggest the plugin additional locations to look at when loading templates.

In the next example, we make it so that the templates will be loaded from:

• wp-content/themes/yourtheme/search/algolia-autocomplete.php
• wp-content/themes/yourtheme/search/algolia-instantsearch.php

<?php

/**
 * @param array  $locations
 * @param string $file
 *
 * @return array
 */
function yourtheme_algolia_template_locations( array $locations, $file ) {
    if ( $file === 'autocomplete.php' ) {
        $locations[] = 'search/algolia-autocomplete.php';
    } elseif ( $file === 'instantsearch.php' ) {
        $locations[] = 'search/algolia-instantsearch.php';
    }

    return $locations;
}

// functions.php in your theme's root directory.
add_filter( 'algolia_template_locations', 'yourtheme_algolia_template_locations', 10, 2 );

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Please note that templates found in the templates directory we customized in the previous section will always take preceedence.

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