Limit search field to just search a custom post type with custom fields

post_title isn’t a valid argument to WP_Query. If you dump the SQL you will see that it is ignored:

string(189) “SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID FROM wp_posts
WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_type=”investigator” AND
(wp_posts.post_status=”publish”) ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title ASC
LIMIT 0, 6″

You can use name (or pagename) instead, but you cannot push raw SQL through like that. It won’t work:

string(158) “SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND
wp_posts.post_name=”like-%d00d” AND wp_posts.post_type=”investigator” ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title ASC “

If you use the s argument– like this 's' => $_POST['s']–, you get something like you are looking for:

string(310) “SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID FROM wp_posts
WHERE 1=1 AND (((wp_posts.post_title LIKE ‘%d00d%’) OR
(wp_posts.post_content LIKE ‘%d00d%’))) AND (wp_posts.post_password =
”) AND wp_posts.post_type=”investigator” AND (wp_posts.post_status=”publish”) ORDER BY wp_posts.post_title ASC LIMIT 0, 6″

But you are searching more fields than just the title. To restrict that to the title only, you can use a filter from another of my answers:

function only_title_search_wpse_119422( $search ) {
    remove_filter( 'posts_search', 'only_title_search_wpse_119422' );

    global $wpdb;

    $pattern = "/\({$wpdb->posts}.post_title[^)]+\)/";
    preg_match_all( $pattern, $search, $matches );

    if ( ! empty( $matches[0] ) ) {
        $search = sprintf(
            " AND (%s)",
            implode( " AND ", $matches[0] )
        );
    }

    return $search;
}
add_filter( 'posts_search', 'only_title_search_wpse_119422' );

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