Custom/Advance Search Nightmare – Please Help

Hello,

I am fairly new with php and wordpress, so I am sorry if I ask some newbie questions.

Here’s what I am trying to do:

On my website, users are able to log in, and upload their projects. (projects – that’s what the website is all about) Those projects will be posted on the projects page so people within can see what’s happening in their community and engage on those projects to help those in need.

I have manage to do almost all of it. Set up the roles that I wanted, created many meta boxes for custom fields within my custom post (projects) and etc.

Now, I have a page called “Project Search” in which I want people to be able to make an advance search (there will be a form in that page). I want them to be able to either type in the project name, or select a neighborhood from a drop down menu, or type in a zip code, or select a start date, select a project type, etc. It would be best if they could select all of those, for example, -search a project within this neighborhood, that has a type “engaged learning”, its category is “education”, and it start date is october of 2013- then a list of the projects that meet that criteria would show up.

I have found that most of that information is within the wp_postmeta table, and I have tried many different things, but the best I could do was to create a drop down showing the project types – but no search results.

I really don’t know how to get started with this, and I have been researching and trying different things for a few days now.

Any help would be SUPER appreciated.

Thanks!