Web Wash: Using Autocomplete Deluxe in Drupal CMS

Once everything has been configured, navigate to the content edit form, and you should see the autocomplete deluxe widget.

2. Select terms by clicking them from the dropdown list, and each selected term appears as a removable tag in the field.

3. Click on “Manage form display”

3. Reorder terms by clicking and holding a selected term, dragging it to the desired position, and releasing it to place it in the new order.

Users need to know what terms exist before they can search for them, and there’s no easy way to reorder selected terms.

Installing Autocomplete Deluxe

3. Custom Messages allow you to personalize the user experience. Set an “Empty value message” to display when no value is entered, and a “Term not found message” to show when a term can’t be found.

Yes, this is controlled by the field settings rather than the widget settings. Edit the field configuration to set minimum and maximum values.

Configuring Autocomplete Deluxe Widget

composer require 'drupal/autocomplete_deluxe:^2.1'

The default autocomplete widget for taxonomy terms in Drupal works, but it has limitations that affect user experience.

For example, the first tag can be configured to receive higher importance in search results when using modules like Search API with proper configuration.

Once you’ve configured these settings to your preference, click “Update” to save your changes.

1. The Match Operator controls how terms are matched when typing – you can choose “Contains” to match if the term contains the typed text anywhere, or “Starts with” to match only if the term begins with the typed text.

Autocomplete Deluxe is primarily designed for taxonomy term reference fields, though it may work with other entity reference fields that support autocomplete.

Customizing Autocomplete Deluxe Settings

Autocomplete Deluxe solves these problems by providing an enhanced widget with better usability.

This tutorial explains how to install and configure the Autocomplete Deluxe module to improve the tagging experience on Drupal sites.

These improvements offer a more intuitive content creation process, particularly for sites with large vocabularies.

After selecting the Autocomplete Deluxe widget, click the cogwheel icon to access additional configuration options:

Once the module has been installed, go ahead and use the widget on an entity reference field.

4. The “Allow new terms” option enables content editors to create new terms directly from the content creation form, eliminating the need to navigate to the vocabulary management page separately.

Using Autocomplete Deluxe

2. You can adjust the “Limit of output” setting to determine how many items appear in the dropdown list. The default is 10, but consider your total number of terms before modifying this value to ensure optimal performance.

5. Change the widget from “Autocomplete (Tags style)” to “Autocomplete Deluxe”

1. Navigate to Structure > Content types

2. Select the content type that contains your tags field

No, changing the widget only affects how users interact with the field. Your existing taxonomy term references remain intact.

This helps users discover what tags already exist in the system.

Benefits of Term Reordering

Table of Contents

• SEO optimization
• Content categorization
• Search result relevance

Click on the X icon to remove the term.

Summary

The ability to reorder terms is particularly valuable for:

Autocomplete Deluxe enhances Drupal’s taxonomy term autocomplete by immediately displaying terms, simplifying selection, enabling drag-and-drop reordering, and allowing on-the-fly term creation.

FAQs