434 – Unlocking faceted search in WordPress with Ross Morsali of Search & Filter

[00:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 434 entitled, unlocking faceted Search in WordPress with Ross Morsali of Search and Filter. It was published on Thursday, the 21st of August, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a few moments I'll be joined by Ross for that chat.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Ross Morsali. He has a product called Search and Filter, that's the free version. He's also got a version called Search and Filter Pro, that's the paid version. And this allows you to do faceted search.

So you know when you go to things like Netflix and you want to figure out what it is that you want to watch tonight. So you drill down by category, by actor, and so on and so forth. Well, search and filter allows you to do that. It could be property listings, it could be ecommerce listings. It could be a default version of WordPress. There are so many options, so many ways to display the different filtering capabilities. And Ross is here today to explain why he built it, how he built it, and what he plans in the future.

It's all coming up next in the podcast, and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast by Ross Morsali. Hello, Ross.

[00:05:18] Ross Morsali: Hello, Nathan. How's it going?

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to chat to you, Ross and I have been chatting for a good half an hour already, it's always a bit contrived at the beginning of these podcasts where we say that, but, very nice to connect with you.

We've met in the real world, but, the endeavor of this podcast is to introduce you to Ross. That's the first thing, but also to a product that Ross has had for a, very long time. I think in the WordPress space, I think there's a lot of heritage here. it's gonna enable you to do faceted searching, filtering, all that fun stuff.

But, before we get into the weeds of the plugin and what it does and how it works, let's just learn a little bit more about Ross. So your potted bio. Ross, just tell us a little bit about yourself, how long you've been using WordPress, that kind of thing.

[00:06:00] Ross Morsali: Yeah, I've been using WordPress for about 13, 14 years.

I used to have a, still do, actually have a, an agency in London, based in London. And, yeah, we switched over to WordPress about 13, 14 years ago and never looked back. And I think it was about 10 ish years ago, decided to make, a free plugin for the WordPress repository called Search and Filter.

just put it out there for some fun and one thing led to another, and here we are. Looks like we got a full. Full blown product business.

[00:06:36] Nathan Wrigley: That's nice. So the initial, version of this software, and I suspect we'll talk about the pro version a little bit more than the free version, but dear listener, have in mind that there's obviously a free version in the repo.

It was a completely 100% no pro. It was all on the repo. And then obviously a product like that, if it gains popularity, presumably you have to pay for your time a little bit. So the pro version came much later.

[00:07:00] Ross Morsali: Yeah, I think it was only a couple of years. When, when I was working on it initially, the only reason I made it was 'cause I couldn't find something that did what I needed easily.

It's just, scratching your own niche. and I think it was around then. But some, other plugins popped up, but I was not quite aware of them. So I went and rolled and, made this free version.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: That's fascinating. and I did not know that, but I guess that's how many of these things begin, isn't it?

In the WordPress space? Somebody scratches their own itch, builds a plugin, sticks it on, the repo realizes there's. Probably quite a lot of use outside of their own personal use. And so the, business blossoms and, a career is made that you didn't intend to exactly. To have. Yeah, the same would be true of this podcast.

Dear listener, I'm gonna ask you to pause this podcast and go to this URL. Go to search and filter.com just exactly as you'd imagine. Search and filter.com, all as one word. No hyphens, nothing like that. And, have a poke around and you'll get a really good understanding of what the product can do.

However, if you're nowhere near a computer, perhaps you're driving the car or something like that, you're gonna, you're gonna need Ross to shepherd you on the journey. so let's do that on, the very highest level, what does the product do? If we go to search and filter.com, what are we finding over there?

What have you built?

[00:08:18] Ross Morsali: Yeah. The top level is it's fasted search. That means you can create search fields. It means you can create filters. And these filters are for your end users to use for, your shops or your listings. And you can use these filters to filter any kind of WordPress post type.

And then those filters will be connected to, almost any kind of WordPress data type. So yeah, just filtering your posts by the data that posts have attached to them.

[00:08:45] Nathan Wrigley: Now you use the word faceted there and I've, heard this word connected to products like you have many, times.

I, but I've, associated it in my head with what it is, but I actually dunno. What faceted means is, that like a technical piece of coding, which, yeah.

[00:09:00] Ross Morsali: Yeah. So what, we don't really use that language, on our website and to our customers 'cause it is a little bit more technical, I think.

we just say filtering and searching and dynamic updates. But what true faceted search is when, let's say you have two, two fields, two filters on your website. Let's say I have a. WooCommerce shop and I have, some color choices to filter by, and I have some size choices, small, medium, large. If I choose, say, red, as a color choice, then the small, medium, large, maybe large will go missing, as an option to filter by because there is no large available in red.

So it's this kind of dynamic relationship between the different fields. and yeah, that's the crux cr Yeah.

[00:09:48] Nathan Wrigley: O okay. So the faceted portion is how the, different data types combine. So a perfect example there, if there's red, but there's no medium in red, the medium goes away, that kind of thing.

So it's the ability to combine those different things. Yeah. So the a really good example, I think, which at least in my head. Sums this up perfectly because I know that more or less, everybody who's an adult has probably done this before, is imagine, for example, a, property search or something like that.

So you go to a website where they're selling properties and the property is obviously the house or the flat or what have you. But that property will have many sorts, sub categories. so the number of bedrooms, whether it's got a garden or not, how big the rooms are, this kind of thing, how much it costs and so on.

And You could use a plugin, like you've got search and filter, you could use that to, to construct things. So you would, for example, create a custom post type of house or properties or what have you, and give it price fields and you'd give it, I don't know, room type fields and you'd give it whether or not it's got a garden field.

And, in that way, you could then add. These properties, one after another. And then on the front end, this is the important bit. The front end people with no experience, they don't need any kind of technical background at all. They're just confronted with an interface, which allows them to tick a box to say, only show me stuff under $300,000, or whatever it might be.

And, the plugin will figure that out and just get rid of everything, which doesn't satisfy that. But then you can build up those. So show me 300,000 or and below, and garden. And so in that way you can filter down further, into the weeds, and that's what the product does. So I'm describing it for you, but have I got that about right?

[00:11:36] Ross Morsali: That's exactly what it's for. That's exactly how it works. Yeah. Yeah. For all kinds of content and, that's the crux of it. Yeah.

[00:11:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. how, on a technical level, how does it work? So if we are in the backend of WordPress, can we just use this with. A default version of WordPress. Does it have any utility at that point?

So we've got no custom post types, we've got no custom fields, anything like that. Does it have any utility? I'm guessing you could filter against, I don't know, authors.

[00:12:07] Ross Morsali: What you'll, probably start with is, the WordPress post types. So you'll have the, post, post type normally for the blog, and you'll have tags and categories.

So straightaway you can get started with those. So you could build like a searching and filtering system for filtering your blog. you could create a search field. You could create, a filter for the categories, a filter for the tags, the same again, you could, add a date, a date, search field, a date filter, and search, your blog, posts by, date range or specific date.

and then also the author. that's another field that you could use. let me think. What else do we have? We have so many fields, but I'm wondering what the overlap is with the default WordPress install.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I would just.

[00:12:53] Ross Morsali: I'm sure we've got some more.

[00:12:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I'm, so for example, things, the ones that jumped out to me were tags, categories, and authors and things like that.

it has utility in a default. WordPress install. You could say, just show me the post written by. Ross, for example, or show me the post written by Ross, which have been tagged as, I dunno, search or something like that. So it works in that scenario, but I'm guessing that the, real beauty of this plugin is when you combine it with other products that enable you to do complicated custom fields and custom post types and that kind of thing.

Exactly. We'll get into that in a minute, but you, just mentioned and you Went straight through it. Obviously this is your product and so you know it inside and out, but there was quite a lot there that I want to unpick. So for example, you mentioned dates, so that, obviously straight away, that's me thinking.

Okay, that's a very specific type of data and if you're gonna search it, presumably there might be an end date, a beginning. Those kind of things. You mentioned in a previous example, you mentioned colors. So there's another kind of thing, maybe I'm clicking on an actual color, a little lozenge, which is representing that actual color.

Or maybe I'm clicking on the word red or I'm selecting a dropdown with red in it, those kind of things. But you also mentioned some other things which like prices. It might be a slider, something like this. So I'm, what I'm trying to tease out here is what are the kind of components that you can build up these searches with?

So I just mentioned you could click on a, dropdown field or you could have a slider or you could have a, I dunno, a date picker or something. So I know there's a lot there, and you might not wanna go through them all, but just give us an outline of the, kind of data that you can use and the way it can be displayed.

[00:14:38] Ross Morsali: Yeah. yeah, we have quite a lot of different types of data. I'll start with the ones that come with WordPress, from the beginning, from a clean install, which is like your post attributes. So you might wanna build filters for post type. So if you have a listing with multiple post types, let's say you want to mix, blog posts with pages, you can create a filter to then filter out the blog posts of the pages.

And the same with post status. It is, not as commonly used. but you can get different kind of post statuses. I would imagine maybe in a shop where you might have posts that are coming soon, any products that are coming soon, and that might have a custom post status or products that are on back order or products that are in some other kind of state.

so you can then use that post status to filter that. then we also have post author, which we just discussed, and yeah. And then you've got, you've got taxonomies and custom fields, and then you get into more complicated data types based around custom fields when you're using add-ons like a CF.

Pods and things like that.

[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So out the box there was actually way more in that, in, in the default version of WordPress than I imagined there'd be. So that's interesting. So it, it has utility just with a native version of WordPress. But again, if you've been in the WordPress space for any length of time, you may have dabbled into sort of custom code using default custom fields and custom post types within WordPress, leveraging that.

But I think most people rely on third party plugins. And you, mentioned things like a CF. Pods, and there's no doubt, a laundry list of those that I've never heard of as well. But do you, it sounds like you tightly bind into those. as an example, if I was a user of a CF that ships with a whole, smorgasbord, oh, I'm glad that got to use that word.

In the podcast, there's a whole ton of different data types that they store. URLs, they'll store user data, they'll store, date ranges, all of that kind of thing. And. And you will bind with all of those, pods, a, c, f, you've, gone into the weeds of their code and built it around what they can give you.

[00:17:03] Ross Morsali: Yeah. a CF is the one that we have the best support for. and just because it's so popular, we've built in the a CF features into the car plugin. most time, most of the times when we're doing integration, we'll build like an extension plugin or something like that. but a CF is just so prevalent that all those features are built directly in.

So yeah, we, probably support like 80% of the. Hundreds of, field types and data types and, repeater fields and group fields and nested group fields and all that kind of crazy stuff. you can get really complicated data structures and we'll support all of that out of the box. you just have to take the a CF integration when you enable it.

And the new, the, UI expands and gives you all these extra options for integration.

[00:17:51] Nathan Wrigley: So the name of the plugin, search and filter. There's obviously, two things going on there, and it sounds to me like the search bit is the bit where the user interacts. they're, clicking buttons, they're typing things into fields, they're sliding things around, and then the filter bit is where they then see.

The output of that. I could be wrong about, oh no, That wouldn't be true, would it? Because you could No, ignore what I just said. But there are still two parts. You've got the Searchy Filtery bit, which is the bit I've just described, where you're typing things in, sliding things. You're trying to reduce it all down, filter it if you like.

But then there's the bit where the results come. So how in the backend, I, know it's difficult to encapsulate this in words, but we'll, have to, 'cause we're an audio podcast. How do you actually build these things and how do you, match up the visual display? as an example, in my house website, I would like to put several different fields, how much it costs, how many bedrooms it's got, does it have a garden?

That kind of thing. And I'd like people to be able to interact with that, but then I obviously want an output from that. And I wanna be able to show, let's say an image, the featured image, or a slider of images, the price displayed underneath. So essentially I'm, after little cards, little data cards that I show.

How do you build and bind those two things together? Is it a relatively straightforward thing or is it really the domain of developers for your product?

[00:19:13] Ross Morsali: The way we see it is there's a lot of great tools out there already that allow you to build great layouts. that's a layout builder's job.

in a way, we can say, with Gutenberg you have the query loop block and you can build, listings and all sorts of things, and then other plugins can, leverage that and, make that experience even richer than, say, if we were to build this ourselves or include it in the plugin, we wouldn't be able to compete because you have all these plugins like a c, F and you can put, a CF data types into your layouts.

there's, slider plugins and all that kind of stuff that utilize a query loop. So what we do is we take an approach of integrating with things that build layouts. Okay. Already. Okay. So for the block editor, we integrate with a query loop and a couple of others, generate blocks of their own query loop also.

So we integrate with that. and we just have like a kind of. A UI for it in our admin area to say, Hey, we want to talk with that query loop, we our filters as opposed to affect that query loop. so that's one, one kind of part of it. The thing is, most page builders have their own equivalent, and then most page builders also have plugin companies building other versions of query loops and things like that on top.

So Elemental comes with, oh, if I can remember the name, it's a query. I think it's a grid. I can't quite remember. I think it's, I'm, gonna go with like query loop, but that's the thing. Yeah, we'll go that. Yeah. Experience. It's the elemental

[00:20:50] Nathan Wrigley: thing, which gets you query, query the element. Query builder.

[00:20:53] Ross Morsali: Exactly. The elemental have a bunch, actually they have five or six widgets that use a query underneath. which is, the thing that. defines what you're gonna show, which is, your post type and all that kind of stuff. so they have the, and I'm really kicking myself for not remembering the name, but they have this query loop builder.

It's fine. they have a posts widget, which is just for posts. They have a products widget. they have a bunch of different widgets, for displaying, posts. So we integrate with all of those via our elementary extension, plugin. yeah,

[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: so if I was to go, so I'm a massive user of Gutenberg.

That is where I've landed. I'm all about that. And, but I do, on top of that, I do put some of the bits and pieces. So generate blocks is my go-to, block. Plugin of choice, if And so if I go into the block editor and I throw in a query loop from in, in this case, let's go with the default WordPress query loop, which is actually now getting significant updates and it's looking pretty good.

So I throw in that as a block that's now on in my, let's say it's a page. Go into a page, create that, throw in the query loop block. Do I then have a block of yours, which I throw into another part of that page? Say for example, above it, or perhaps I could set up a sidebar or something like that. Is that how it works?

So I put in the query loop and then I put in the search and filter block, which then does the heavy lifting on the front end,

[00:22:26] Ross Morsali: more or less. Exactly. Okay. we released version three, last October. And the idea was that we would be 100% integrated with the block editor, and I'll call WordPress.

that's always been our ethos, is support all of WordPress, default. WordPress by default. And, the block editor is part of that. I believe, and all, some of our competitors and things like that, they, usually have this kind of experience where you build something in one of their admin pages and then you go into the block editor and.

Link it up or something like that.

[00:23:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:23:02] Ross Morsali: what we've done a bit different is we have this experience, like an admin experience, a custom admin area for all the other use cases that are not the block editor, but for the block editor. we want that to be like a first class, solution for the block editor.

Interesting. Okay. And you can build everything in there so you can. Add a search field, and then you get the whole sidebar of all your options for the search field. So you can go through and tinker with that and choose your data type and go to the styling panel and change the colors and the border color and the font size and all that kind of stuff, all within the block editor.

So it's a completely native experience. So you shouldn't really have the feeling that you need to leave the block editor to build something with our plugin or build something with. Your layouts.

[00:23:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let me just make sure that I've understood that correctly. So if I am in the block editor, I drag in the search and filter block for want of a better word, and then I am building it, whatever that, set of searches and filters are, I build it inside there and all of the settings are visible to me inside the block editor, so I can really get granular and there it is.

However, if I'm using, let's say Elementor. Then you rely on a different setting area within your plugin. You'd build it over there, go to Elementor, and then pick it, and drop it in as one of their elements. And obviously you'd have built it elsewhere and you'd have to give it a name and select the correct one.

And what have you have I got that about right?

[00:24:34] Ross Morsali: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. So, the block editor gets this deep, rich experience and. For now at least. yeah, you can build everything that you need to from our admin UI as well.

[00:24:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.

[00:24:43] Ross Morsali: It's like a reskinned block editor. You go and you, create a field and you have a sidebar and you, save that field with a name, and you get all the same options as the block editor.

It's built with the Gutenberg components, so it looks kind of block edge, like a block two essentially. and then you can then link that to whatever page builder that you're, using.

[00:25:05] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. That's interesting as well. Okay. So the, other nice thing about that is everything's in one place, isn't it?

So if you go to the page where you've got this search and filter happening, you click edit and all of the settings are there. It's not like you have to remember, where did I build that?

[00:25:19] Ross Morsali: Yeah, we've got this two way sync. yeah. So anything you do in the block editor is it lives outside to, to get a bit technical, it lives outside of.

The page that you put it on. We have another, like a table, a custom table, and we store. Like a mapping of that field there. So then when you go to the admin screen, you can see it there in, in our, ui. You can list all your fields together. and then, or you can just go and edit it in the page. It's like a bidirectional thing.

[00:25:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. So let's say for example, I have a sudden desire to duplicate almost a, one of the, one of the searches and filter. Sections of my website, you have a UI where I could go and say, replicate that, duplicate that. I'll do it again. But I, only want this slight modification.

I just wanna drop this thing and add this one thing in and then it's available. So even if you build it inside the block editor, it's available in a normal list that you would see in WordPress. Like, everything else. You'd be able to see that there. Okay. Oh, that's the best of every world, isn't it? I think best in that.

You've options in it's the best. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:23] Ross Morsali: But it's also, it is a little bit, I would. Just be honest and say it's a little bit, it can, it can cause a bit of confusion sometimes. so there's a bit of an onboarding thing that we have to do to get people to understand. Yeah. That's how it works. Yeah.

[00:26:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. As soon as you're presenting options to edit and modify things in two places, yeah. The cognitive load is gonna, collapse. How does this scale, so let's say, for example, I've got a really successful e-commerce site. So I've got WooCommerce, which as we know, is fairly resource intensive.

Anyway, let's imagine that I've got, I don't know, 10,000 products, 10,000 SKUs, and each of those. Got multiple different facets within them. So they've got colors and they've got sizes, and they've got prices and they've got descriptions and blah, blah, blah, blah. how does this, scale basically, ca can the plugin handle any amount of data that's coming at it?

How, does that work? Because I can imagine if you've got huge amounts of data, that must be quite a lot for you to a, big job for you to start searching and filtering those.

[00:27:26] Ross Morsali: Yeah. that's a good question. This kind of stuff, isn't infinitely scalable whatsoever. there's always limitations.

So the main limitation is you have a WordPress website with a MySQL database, and you're on a host. So it's, it can be data intensive, depending on your configuration and the things that you want. So if you want, one of the biggest challenges with all of the plugins, like this kind of plugin is faceted search like.

Like, we were discussing earlier, so the ability for fields to show and hide options based on the current search parameters, that is probably the most demanding piece of work that the plugin does. not just the straight searching in the, tables or the database or things like that. It's this building relationships between options and fields and, ultimately the query that you're displaying.

That is the most demanding part. and on a My SQL database, on a WordPress install, there's, limitations. So I would say that in our plugin, I usually would recommend around 20,000 posts as you're upper limit. mileage may vary. we've seen people with 50,000, I'm not sure how they're pulling that off.

They probably have a nice server. but yeah, so up until a certain point, you're gonna hit a kind of ceiling where. this kind of, all these calculations for all these fields and all these relationships between all the options, it gets exponentially bigger and bigger So yeah, that's what I would say is like a soft limit is around 20,000.

you can, add caching, you can improve your server, you can improve your, database, server, things like that. There's all kinds of tweaks you can do to push it further and further but I would recommend. If you're looking at 50,000 over, that's when we kinda say, Hey, look, you probably looking at Elasticsearch solution.

Amazon isn't using MySQL database for a good reason for their search. you, need a different kind of database server to facilitate that functionality at like really high scale. Okay, Yeah. Yeah. So that's, an elastic based search solution is for, that kind of stuff.

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But that's interesting though. 'cause I imagine for the, majority of the people that you are selling the plugin to 20,000 still represents, that's still quite a lot. yeah, I've been doing podcasting for years and I'm probably getting close to about 700 episodes. That feels like a lot of, and I'm nowhere near, the ceiling that you're representing there, but it makes sense, if you're imagining what's actually going on as you do this.

these filters, let's say you've got 20,000 custom post types and they've, again, leaning on properties, each of those has got bedrooms and prices and pictures and blah, blah, blah, and you start to filter them down. That is a lot of data that you are polling and you're expecting it to come back in a heartbeat.

And it's, a MySQL database. I suppose you're asking a lot. It's very shared host. yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so just in, in terms of the, product, we can obviously go to the website. I've mentioned the url, search and filter, dot com. You can go there and check it out. What are you working on at the moment?

Because obviously. I imagine that you've already built the vast majority of what it is that you thought you were going to build. So what's in store? What are some of the interesting things that are on the roadmap for Ross in the future?

[00:30:56] Ross Morsali: One thing that happened when we released a version three, and last released last October, was a complete rewrite of the plugging ground up for the block editor and, this whole new architecture too.

To make it super flexible and, much easier to integrate with other tools and things like that. So for now, one of the main things is to, we essentially, we have a few, integrations that we had in version two. We had a lot of integrations in version two, and we haven't yet rebuilt all of them for version three.

So we're gonna be looking at all the page builders. Again, essentially. So we've already got in version three, support for Elementor. we'll be adding bricks, actually that's a brand new integration. Yeah. That, yeah. That's really popular now.

[00:31:43] Nathan Wrigley: Isn't it? Yeah. So yeah.

[00:31:44] Ross Morsali: Yeah, we're just, bricks have just released version two we believe.

and once, we had a look at the version one code and it was a bit difficult to integrate with from, our side of things, so we thought we'll just leave it there for a while, and see if things change in the future. And with version two. They've made a few things easier for us, so we've jumped on that.

We're in the final testing now of our BrickX integration, and that's probably in a couple of weeks. so we're gonna go around the houses and fill in the blanks for the other page builders that we used to have support for. So that's WP Bakery, page Builder Divvy. yeah, there's a bunch of them.

Normally, we, would probably end up integrating with, all the, main ones, essentially.

[00:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so like widespread support then. So you are not just the block editor or Elementor, there's a whole different, I guess you put the amount of work in based upon how popular they are.

Popular they are. Exactly. These things come and go, don't they? page builders have that were really popular several years ago. Maybe they're not getting updated or what have you. And I can see why you would, have a sort of different approach. okay. One question I have is that.

I'm imagining the support burden for you is gonna be fairly front loaded. What I mean is, I'm imagining that when people buy this and get into it, that's where they're getting stock. And the initial kind of week with it is gonna be the how does this work? What the heck I'm. Completely confused, that kind of thing.

So how do you, offer support? Do you offer is it like an email back and forward? Do you have a live chat? what's the deal there and what are your hours, is it like weekends out, excluding weekends or what

[00:33:23] Ross Morsali: we offer, we use a ticketing system called Help Scout, which is email based.

Okay. Yep. So essentially you can go to our website or if you've got a support email address and drop us an email or fill out the form. we've got an integration for Help Scout. Your all your tickets and everything like that, it's all manageable from your account. So you can go and view all your old tickets, you can see what's open, what's closed, what's pending, that kind of stuff.

And yeah, we advertise, UK kind of business hours. that's where, we started. but we're, you'll often find us outside of those hours, but it's just to set expectations. Yeah. That we don't work weekends. We weekends are off officially. and then, yeah, we just set the kind of UK hours.

Yeah, but you'll, find me on, personally all kinds of odd hours and yeah, the support staff do sim similar things. So

[00:34:15] Nathan Wrigley: it's the nature of having a plugin in the WordPress space. Isn't there sort of expectation that you'd be available at all the hours? But I can imagine that is gonna be quite important at the beginning because it's not without technical.

Understanding. if you buy, I dunno, some plugins, it's just really obvious. It does one thing and it's dead simple. You turn it on and it's doing it yours because you're building things in the background and there's probably ways to do it better than others. And, certain channels that you've gotta understand.

Yeah.

[00:34:44] Ross Morsali: That's something we're trying to solve. so the thing about searching and filtering is, I think it's quite a technical concept to begin with. So if you are new to WordPress. It's can be quite overwhelming. it's all the data types, post types and meta fields and all this kind of stuff.

It's, just, I think it's quite complex by nature. Yeah. So half the battle is making the process easier or explaining it so as you, rightly said, we get a lot of support burden from people just coming in and going like. Where do I start, what do I do and things like that. a little bit of education and we have some, room for improvement in our docs and things like that.

but one thing that we're working on at the moment is an update for a proper onboarding wizard. and that's probably not too far from release. Oh, nice. and that's gonna take you through from, figuring out what integrations you've got on your website. So if you've got an elemental. We'll say, Hey, you've got Elementor.

Let's enable all the Elementor features from the get go. or, Hey, you're using the block editor. Things like that. and then you can go into the next stage. And, something I didn't mention previously, it's another big update. We've got this huge design update, so you can really go crazy with, how deep you get into the design of the field.

So you can change the borders of an input field, like of a search field. You can change the border radius, you can change the background color.

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. yeah.

[00:36:14] Ross Morsali: You can change, all kinds of things like focus colors, hovers, colors. it's gonna be really, granular. So step two is this. When you add more features, you also add more confusion sometimes.

[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:36:27] Ross Morsali: So that's why we're building it into this wizard. so step two is a, nice automated way to choose a few of these options. You don't have to design everything from scratch. Choose a few colors, like a, main color for a color palette, and then we'll generate all these, access. We'll generate a palette based, off your preferences.

And that'll be like accessibility friendly. We do some checks in there to generate a good pallet and things like that. Yeah. And you do a few, design options and it's like setting your default theme. and then the final step is like a demo creator. So something, people have demos on their websites and then they have tutorial on their websites.

and we have those things too. But people like wanna know really, quickly from when they turn on your plugin. Oh yeah. Hey, can it do what I want? And obviously also like, how does it work? So when you get onto the last step of the wizard, like the summary, it's okay, you're all set up, you're good to go, but would you like to create a demo page?

So if you've enabled the block editor as in your step one will say, would you like to enable, create a demo page in the block editor? And you click okay, and then it will just generate a page with some fields and some and a query loop and things like that. So you just got one click and off you go.

You've got a demo on your site. You can go and edit it and start playing with it. And I think getting your hands on like as early as possible into the plugin and seeing something working. It is super important to remove frustration and and then just for you to just have the understanding like, ah, yes, this can do what I want it to do.

It might have taken me an hour or two to figure it all out, but here it is just working in. Personally, I like to work with a working example. some people might not want the demo. they might just wanna kinda go through documentation and do the tutorials, but for me it's like I, I'd rather get stuck in and see how it works.

So that's what we've got there. We've got the same for Elementor as well. We're gonna do the same. If you've enabled Element a mentor, you go to the last step. Open an Elementor page, like pre-made for you essentially, so you can just get stuck right in and start, messing with things. And the idea is to eventually roll that out to every page builder that we're gonna support.

So I. This. This, I'm hoping is gonna reduce loads of support burden. Yeah,

[00:38:44] Nathan Wrigley: I'm hoping too.

[00:38:45] Ross Morsali: It's, we'll build it for you, essentially. Yeah. At least a very minimal version. Yeah. Yeah. And then hopefully you can learn a lot quicker that version. You can figure

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: it out from inside the demo. Yeah. Yeah. Because obviously when you started this plugin, I'm guessing that you were literally handling.

The searching and the filtering and the rest was up to you. You gotta figure out all of the other bits and pieces, but now you've taken on the burden of, what it looks like as well. you mentioned the, borders around the fields and the colors and the fonts and all of that. So there's a lot.

And also, even though. Faceted search is now so ubiquitous across the internet. Everybody completely gets how to use it. you go to a property website and within, even though you've never seen their configuration on that website of how to search and filter within. 20 seconds, you'll have figured it out.

Okay. Oh, I click in there and I do this. But building those searches is not necessarily as intuitive as you might imagine. So I can well imagine that you do get a lot of support. And so building that wizard and somebody can hop in and immediately see, oh. That's how you do it. Yeah. That makes perfect sense to me.

And, you have probably one of the more complicated products in the WordPress space, in all honesty. I know that page builders do a lot and what have you, but in, in terms of complexity and the capacity for things to behave unexpectedly or to go wrong or for you to misunderstand how to build it, I think.

I think that's true. you've got a lot there. So having those wizards and those onboarding demos. Yeah, that seems like a really great idea. Okay, let's get to the knob of it. This is the question everybody will wanna know. How much does it cost? And, so it won't surprise you to know that I've gone to forward slash pricing to, to figure out the cost of things.

And, I'll just read it into the record. Cavi emptor. We're recording this in August, 2025. The prices might change, but for now, especially this podcast, we often get people listening to things years after the fact. At the minute, one site is $39. This is obviously the pro version. There's a repo version if you want to use it on, up to three sites.

There's 89. Dollars. And then there's the, unlimited site option, which is called developer, and that's $219. Is it as simple as that or do you, are there different things which you throw in or is it just the number of sites that you get?

[00:41:09] Ross Morsali: So at the moment is just the number of sites, yeah. But we are kicking up, a top secret new feature for the end of the year that won't be on the starter plan.

Okay. Probably from professional level, but yeah. I like to keep things simple. I don't, I wouldn't want to make it too confusing, but there will be a couple of features. eventually I think that will be in the slightly higher TA plans, but yeah. Okay. It's a number of sites essentially.

[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: So my final thing, it is not really a question, it's an observation, and you can speak, you can answer it.

If I was putting this, feature that you have searching and filtering on my site, the one thing that I wanna know, there's two things really is. firstly, does it work reliably? That's the first thing I wanna know, can I bank on this working? And secondly, is it gonna be here in a few years time?

Because you, this is gonna be an important part of any site. If you're searching, if you, if, you put this in, if you wanna build it, have it work from that moment on. So let. Let's just assume that Ross knows what he's doing. 'cause he's been doing it for years. let's, so let's just say it's gonna work.

Let's just blanket over that. But the next thing, I, it sounds like a silly question, but it's an important question. It, you are sticking around with this, right? This is what you do for a living, basically. and I know that seems like a trite question, but people want to know that. They wanna know that you are gonna be here in years to come.

[00:42:33] Ross Morsali: I remember one customer who used to email me every year. For about four years in a row. Double checking that I was gonna be around the next year. Yeah.

[00:42:42] Nathan Wrigley: See.

[00:42:42] Ross Morsali: So

[00:42:43] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not making it up.

[00:42:44] Ross Morsali: Yeah, it's, I mean it's super important I think as well. it's a little bit like, not as much, but it's like investing in a page builder.

Exactly.

[00:42:53] Nathan Wrigley: That

[00:42:54] Ross Morsali: it's,

a lot of effort to set up in the first place. like I say, we have a complicated plugin, Setting it up can be a bit more complicated than other plugins. And there's a time and effort investment and a learning curve and things like that. Nevermind just the running of your site that you want to guarantee it's gonna carry on running.

So yeah, super important question. yeah, I mean we've been around for the free version was I think around just over 10 years. The pro version has been 10 years already. This is actually the 10th year, if I'm remembering correctly. Nice to check that. So celebrating a decade already. and. I'll be transparent.

This was a side gig for me and on the side of my agency, for the first seven years or something like that. And then when COVID hit, this became the main thing. So this is my main focus and this is my main business and this is my livelihood and, this is where I see myself going in the future.

So we'll be around for years to come, for sure.

[00:43:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You've literally hit every nail there. I think that was the perfect sim that was the perfect confection of an answer when, you say, this is my livelihood. That's the bit, that's what people wanna know, right? Are you invested? Because this is a big part.

You can't have this going wrong. You need to know that next year is gonna be the same as this year, that the support tickets are gonna get answered. That the plugin is continued, gonna continue to follow whatever the heck WordPress is doing. Whatever the heck elementals doing. Whatever, Feed into that whichever page builder you want.

And, it's gonna be a big part of the site. if you're selling properties or whatever it may be, this is the way that you are gonna encourage your users to purchase the thing or drill down into the thing. And so we wanna know that it's working. I think you did a good job, making us, convinced that A, you've got a lot of heritage and B, that you're gonna be around. So Bravo.

[00:44:46] Ross Morsali: To give you an idea, the roadmap is probably at least two years long. Okay. Yeah. Okay, great. There's some, big stuff in the pipeline just to get past that hurdle. Is, a long time coming.

[00:44:54] Nathan Wrigley: that's the other thing as well, the roadmap thing obviously speaks into your, seriousness about it, not just it's gonna Yeah.

I'm gonna maintain it, it's gonna tick over. If you've got, if you've got big ideas, you're obviously thinking about the future and what it can do and your subscription that you're gonna pay. You're gonna be getting more and more as time goes on. Okay? In that case, let's call it a day there.

Let's knock it on the head and say. One last time into the record, the URL to go and check this out is search and filter.com. Over there you're gonna find the, pro version of the plugin forward slash pricing if you want to know how much it costs. But also on there, there's options to see the integrations, to get into the documentation and what have you as well, so you can have a, an understanding about how it all works.

So Ross Mosul, thank you so much for chatting to me about that today. I really appreciate it.

[00:45:45] Ross Morsali: Thanks for having me on the show. It's been fun.

[00:45:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you did search for episode number 434 at wpbuilds.com. Leave us a comment on our WordPress commenting system. It's pretty good for that, you know, not many people use it these days, but you know it's baked into WordPress, and it would be nice to see it being used. Even if you didn't like the episode, leave us a comment. We'd appreciate that too. Don't forget episode number 434.

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