Including author in search for entries

Question

I've got a site-wide search box (based on the example in the documentation). It's doing a good job of searching through the entries, but is there a way that I can include a search through a user group like authors as well and include it in the same list of results?

Currently I just have this but its not getting any results for author searches even though I know they exist. It seems like the authors should be searchable since they're linked to the entry...

{% set entries = craft.entries.search(query).order('score') %}

If I did another search through craft.users.search I could get another list of results, but I'd like to have one combined list. Is something like that possible?

Answer 1

You could use the Twig functions merge and default to merge the two sets of entries.

{% set entries = craft.entries.search(query).order('score')|default([]) %}
{% set authors = craft.users.search('fullName:*' ~ query ~ '*')|default([]) %}

{% if authors %}
    {% set results = entries|merge(authorArticles) %}
{% endif %}

<p>
    You have {{ results|length }} {{ results|length == 1 ? 'result' : 'results' }}.
</p>

The default function is a handy stand-in for short circuit evaluation in twig, so that you can be sure to at least pass an empty array to merge.