It’s more than just an update, it’s an entirely new way of building Search & Filter experiences.
Version 3 has taken years of development, countless iterations and on occasion, throwing everything away and going back to the drawing board…
But we are finally here, with a new version that can do so much more than before, we’re excited to see what you’ll build with it.
Before we get stuck in, let me start by saying that the version 3 isn’t an automatic update – we’ll give you plenty of time if you’re not ready to upgrade just yet.
With that out of the way, lets get in to what’s new.
Fields, re-imagined
Fields have been completely reworked to be more flexible and accessible.
Not only that, we’ve built an entirely new field editor, giving you more space to focus on what’s important and to be able to design and preview your work right within the editor.
We’ve also added tonnes of new options including popular feature requests.
Design & style your fields
We always wanted to give you the ability to make design changes without touching a line of code, and we know form fields are notoriously hard to work with – with our intuitive new UI, making visual changes couldn’t be easier.
We have countless design options for every field type with even more options planned in the future.
Previews in admin
Via our new admin editor or the block editor, you can now build your fields in real time and see your updates as you make changes – no more saving and switching pages to see what’s changed.
Blocks
We’ve always supported core WordPress, and blocks are here to stay whether you use them or not. Our deep integration means that you’ll never have to leave the block editor when building your block based websites.
You can build your fields and edit queries all right within the block editor UI, no sweat.
Place fields individually
Fields can now be placed anywhere. Whether you’re using shortcodes or blocks, or one of our integrations, you can now place fields indiviually. If you want to build a traditional search form, that still possible – but now you’ll be able to control the surrounding markup too.
Accessibility
You might not know it but there are legal accessiblity requirements in the US and Europe coming into effect in 2025 for all websites. We’ve been working with Equalize Digital, experts in WordPress accessibility, to bring our new fields up to the standards required.
Expect more work on accessibility over the coming months which will help ensure your sites are more than ready.
Query Editor, simplified
The query editor has been streamlined and simplified to make integrating with queries on your site quicker and easier. We’ve added popular feature requests like a loading icon with design and style options too.
Full URL and history support
When pressing backwards and forwards in the browser, the history is preserved and so are you fields and results – give your users a seamless experience when navigating.
Styles Editor, for power users
Our first step was to add design options directly to our Field Editor, but we didn’t stop there. We’ve also created a Styles Preset Editor – a styles management system where you can create styles to share between your sites and make sitewide changes in an instant.
Admin UI
Our entire admin UI has been refreshed. We focussed on making building your queries and fields extremely quick and easy. Have play and you’ll see what I mean.
New architecture
One of the main things holding back version 2 was it’s architecture. As we added more features and integrations we began to experience growing pains.
All of the above is now possible thanks to the new and improved underlying architecture – we’ve rebuilt the plugin core from scratch, future proofing the plugin so that we’re able to add new features and integrations much more easily without compromising on performance, stability or accessibility.
Going all in on the freemium model
With the new architecture Search & Filter Pro becomes and addon for the Search & Filter base plugin. When you install Pro, you’ll notice the base plugin is autoinstalled alongside it.
While the base plugin has not been released independently yet, we have big plans for this in the near future.
Developers
We have some exciting improvements for developers and builders, watch this space in the coming months as we share more.
Integrations
We’re in the process of porting all of our version 2 extensions and integrations over to version 3.
Checkout the migration documentation to see which ones are ready to use today and which are on their way.
Search & Fitler isn’t possible without you
Your years of support and feedback have been invaluable to us, everything you’ve been saying, we’ve been hearing and taking on board.
Thank you for choosing us and for making Search & Filter what it is today!