Elementor recently released a taxonomy filter widget (currently in beta as of writing). I’ve been able to create a loop grid and apply a taxonomy filter, which all seems to be working correctly.

I’m trying to sort the loop grid results based on geographical areas (state, then hopefully secondarily, regions).

The technical problem I’m trying to solve is the secondary sorting of the regions when the taxonomies are related. I can successfully sort by either state OR region with one taxonomy filter widget. I can also add another taxonomy filter widget connected to the same loop grid, one for state and one for region, and they successfully work in tandem to filter the loop grid data (Only show results for the state “Missouri” that also are in “East Missouri”.) The problem is that with the second solution, all of the taxonomies are always shown, which makes sense if the taxonomies were unrelated (for example if it was price and color or something like that), but with this specific example, I only want the taxonomy regions for the selected state taxonomy to appear. I don’t need to show “North Missouri” or “East Missouri” regions if Michigan is the selected state. Ideally I would like region taxonomies to remain empty until a state taxonomy is chosen, and then the region taxonomies related to that state taxonomy to be shown.

I was really hoping this would be possible because the taxonomy filter even has a setting to hide taxonomies if there are no results for that query(so “East Missouri” wouldn’t show when another state is selected because none of the query results would match). Unfortunately it seems that setting does not account for the query filter results as a whole, but rather if any results exist for that taxonomy period (so it would only hide “East Missouri” if no posts had been assigned that taxonomy)? I’m hoping I’m wrong in this regard and there’s just something I’m missing here. There is also an option to show child taxonomies, but I can’t find any documentation on how that implementation works, but perhaps that is another route of achieving this solution?

Is there a way to achieve this with Elementor’s taxonomy filter? If not, what alternative methods could achieve something like this?