Hi,

I need to replicate this functionality seen here on the left under “Filter my results” - http://www.jigsaw24.com/products/cad-and-architectural-workflow/software-by-manufacturer/academy-class

Do you think this is possible? Any tips / pointers to how i might have to structure my products channel fields to be able to do something like this?

My client has Products that have a master product and variants of as well. I’m wondering whether to make each one a entry or to use price modifiers. Bearing in mind that i need to have something like this Faceted Search thing going on.

Any guidance would be really gratefully received!

Thanks

John

Do you think this is possible? Any tips / pointers to how i might have to structure my products channel fields to be able to do something like this?

If that data is stored in standard ee channel fields per item, then you can use EE’s search parameter in a channel entries tag. http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/modules/channel/channel_entries.html#search-field-name

You might want to use this too:
http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/modules/channel/channel_entries.html#dynamic-parameters
Set the search parameters as dynamic. Dunno if that’d work exactly the way you want, but might be a good start.

Hi chris, thanks for the reply. I’m wondering whether or not to use categories or channel fields with dropdowns etc for selecting product attributes.

Could you throw in an opinion on which would be best in general and which would work best if trying to implement a faceted search with CT?

Also, do you think i should be asking this on the EE forums rather than here? I think with CT the lines get blurred as to whether it’s a EE question or a CT question!

Thanks

John

Hi chris, thanks for the reply. I’m wondering whether or not to use categories or channel fields with dropdowns etc for selecting product attributes.

I’m personally NOT a fan of categories when used for anything structural. I think if your goal is purely as informational meta-data, then categories are fine, but I’m not a fan of using them in a very deep way. I find that over the long term, they’re less flexible than using field data, and slower. Sometimes it ends up making sense to create something to do direct database pulls, and that gets more difficult when using categories, or field types that store data as serialized data (basically a lot of field types that aren’t your standard text, radio, checkbox, select fields may store serialized data.

Also, do you think i should be asking this on the EE forums rather than here? I think with CT the lines get blurred as to whether it’s a EE question or a CT question!

It’s probably a bit of an EE question, but I at least have some experience-based feedback that I can share, so I don’t mind answering.