Altering the Recipe Collections search with WP Extended Search

When searching for a recipe in the Recipe Collections feature it uses the default WordPress search functionality, which searches the title and recipe summary, but not any of the other fields.

If you want to have more options (like searching ingredients and instructions) you could use the WP Extended Search plugin to set this up. This is a lightweight plugin that allows you to finetune the behavior of the WordPress search in various ways.

Once you've installed the "WP Extended Search" plugin go to their Extended Search > Search Settings page and make sure to create a new setting name at the top:

In this example I created one called "WPRM Recipe Collections" and clicked the "Publish" button. After that, you can ignore the instructions (there is no need to display this search form) but rather click on the blue "Configure Search Setting" button instead, taking note of the "wpessid" (in this example 5286).

In the search settings you can play mourned with the meta keys and taxonomies that should be search. Just make sure "Select Post Types" has "Recipes" selected, as in the example below:

Once you have the search set up, you'll want to set the ID of these search settings as the "WP Extended Search ID" setting on the WP Recipe Maker > Settings > Recipe Collections > Collection Items page: