Two search forms on one page invalidates XHTML 1.0 standards

[abhay]

Two examples:

1. Blog with no posts causes a second search form to appear in the content area with the default Kubrick theme in addition to the search box already in the sidebar. (Although this is really trivial, I would say that this is still worth fixing.)

2. Search yeilding no results produces two search boxes as above. This is more relevant.

Fix would be to revert to the old style where we had the "Search yielded no results" message.

[abhay]

Changes would be to remove this line from wp-content/themes/default/search.php and wp-content/themes/default/index.php :

		<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>

[foolswisdom]

I don't like this fix. Many themes duplicate this style of providing a search box when no results are found, without having to find it in the sidebar.

[Nazgul]

Replying to foolswisdom:

I don't like this fix. Many themes duplicate this style of providing a search box when no results are found, without having to find it in the sidebar.

What other options are there when you're only allowed to have 1 form on a page?

[foolswisdom]

Replying to Nazgul:

What other options are there when you're only allowed to have 1 form on a page?

Showing a search box when no results is a common experience, so the solution should account for that.

[pishmishy]

Personally I don't think that the default theme should ever display more than one search box on any page. It's unnecessary interface clutter.

If the appearance of the side bar never changed between pages throughout the theme I could accept an argument for leaving it for reasons of consistency. But that doesn't appear to be the case.

Patching the theme so that the sidebar search box has a different name is trivial if that turns out to be the preferred option.

Neither change effects what authors of other themes want to do.

[pishmishy]

Change default theme to only ever display one search box

[pishmishy]

With no feedback, only displaying a single search box is my preferred option and I've attached a patch to do this with the default theme.

[pishmishy]

Still no feed back so as much as I'd like to see this issue resolved, closing as WONTFIX. Authors of themes are free to fix this problem as they please.