I’m looking for feedback from more experienced BuddyPress users on the hint text that shows up in search boxes on the BuddyPress default install. The search boxes on various pages read “Search anything…” but they are actually specific to the subsection of the site you are on.

So on the member directory page, the search box says “Search anything…” The text leads people I’ve spoken to to believe it’s some kind of sitewide search.

When I went in to customize the hint to “Search member directory…” I discovered each instance is a separate function call in the default theme with a shared text resource “Search anything…” The messy route I picked to change this was to create a copy of the functions in my child theme functions folder and create copies of the index.php theme files for members and groups sections calling my custom function rather than the plugin version. This is pretty messy and lots of customization for a simple string change.

It seems like maybe it’d be better if the hint text was loaded via a filter or potentially separate language resources strings. Does anyone have thoughts or suggestions? I’d be willing to code some changes and submit it back to BuddyPress. But I want to make sure I head down the best path for the project.

[@mercime Participant 13 years, 7 months ago]

Check this out for some tips – http://buddydev.com/buddypress/creating-the-sitewide-globalunified-search-page-for-your-buddypress-theme/

[@valuser Participant 13 years, 6 months ago]

Installed unified search as per above link and transferred search to sidebar as per @mercime at https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/search-login-bar/ . Truly Excellent tips. Just one extra step required. In Groups,Blogs,and Members Directory there remains a search bar in addition to the unified search now in sidebar. How to remove this ?