Advanced search by two criteria – sort by location and date (ascending or descending)

Question

I finally found a solution. For those who might also stumble on this.

What I had to do is to put ASC and DESC as option values for the date sorting. I read in the documentation that WordPress uses these values by default to sort data.

<select class="dropdown-class" name="order" id="sortbox">
    <option value="DESC">Newest</option>
    <option value="ASC">Oldest</option>
</select>

Then, create a variable that stores the search query values:

$sortedDate=$ _GET[ 'order']; //Either DESC or ASC

Finally, I had to sort the database query using the result from the search query:

  $args=array( 'cat'=>6, 
              'meta_value' => $places, 
              'order'=> $sortedDate, 
              'paged'=>$paged, ); 
  query_posts($args);

Full code:

–advanced-search.php

<?php 
/** 
 * Template Name: Advanced Search 
 * Author: Atanas Yonkov 
 */ ?>

<form class="post-filters" name="search" action="" method="get">
    <select name="place">
        <option value="" disabled selected> Place </option>
        <?php $metakey='place' ; $places=$ wpdb->get_col($wpdb->prepare("SELECT DISTINCT meta_value FROM $wpdb->postmeta WHERE meta_key = %s ORDER BY meta_value ASC", $metakey) ); if ($places) { foreach ($places as $place) { echo "
        <option value=\ "" . $place . "\">" . $place . "</option>"; } } ?>
    </select>

    <select class="dropdown-class" name="order" id="sortbox">
        <option value="DESC">Newest</option>
        <option value="ASC">Oldest</option>
    </select>

    <input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

<?php $places=$ _GET[ 'place']; 
$sortedDate=$ _GET[ 'order']; 

if ($places || $sortedDate) { 
  $paged=( get_query_var( 'paged')) ? get_query_var( 'paged') : 1; 
  $args=array( 'cat'=>6, 
              'meta_value' => $places, 
              'order'=> $sortedDate, 
              'paged'=>$paged, ); 
  query_posts($args); 
} else { 
  query_posts('cat=6&posts_per_page=5'); 
} 

if ($places) { ?>
<h1>Search for: <?php echo $places; ?></h3>
  <?php } else { ?>
  <h3></h3>
  <?php }

— category-6.php

<?php
/**
 * The template for displaying programs
 * Implements custom advanced search filter
 */

get_header(); 
//Call the advanced-search.php template
get_template_part( 'advanced-search', get_post_format()) ?>

    <div class="content-area">
        <?php if ( have_posts() ) : //Loop through posts ?>
            <header class="archive-header">
                <?php
                    the_archive_title( '<h1 class="archive-title">', '</h1>' );
                    the_archive_description( '<div class="archive-description">', '</div>' );
                ?>
            </header><!-- .page-header -->
            <?php
            while ( have_posts() ) :
                the_post();
                get_template_part( 'template-parts/content', get_post_format() );
            endwhile;
        else :
            get_template_part( 'template-parts/content', 'none' );
        endif;
        ?>
    </div><!-- .content-area -->

<?php wp_reset_query(); ?>
<?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();

The final result is that I am able to sort post types from specific category based on two different criteria.

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