For our product type (antibodies for research and diagnostics) we absolutely needed to have an attribute search that was able to "filter" on more than one attribute at the same time. I reviewed all of the threads and found the four mentioned by Goldlion as well as the nearly complete offering from Yellow1912 (he showed me a demo which is nice but not what I wanted) which lets you check off attributes that you want. This was too limiting since we may have 10 attribute options with up to 25 values possible for each!
We ended up paying the $50 for xAttribSearch because it looked like the one I could modify the best. I did not like that the "product Filter Plugin" because you could not limit which attributes to show. (Now that I have worked with xAttrib I know how I could fix that.) I also did not like that you could search but not "buy" or add items listed directly to the cart from the returned list.
Due to the fact that I had never used PhP before, I thought the modification might be out of my reach but I am a gambler when it comes to this stuff. Since I was one of those who actually rode the very front of the ecommerce wave (we made a system from the ground up using Cold Fusion in 1996) I decided I could give this a try.
One defect I found with xAttrib, which I hope they fix, is that you see the ability to add multiple items to the cart but it does not work. I have given them the fix but if they don't implement it let me just give a hint: uncomment a <!--</form> --> and things start to work much better.
You can see my modification on my test site http://aqsp.iqualex.com
Please note that the products are limited 106 out of out 5000 or so, and many of the properties are incorrect and were just tacked on random items so that I could test the site.
Since the mod is not free I do not believe I can just give away my implementation nor the changes to it as that would include giving away their product.
One note about filtering - the first version I made was an AND screening. That is everything the person selected had to be in the attributes of the product or it was excluded. This tended to give a VERY short list and hid many products that might have also been useful or would be appropriate alternatives to the user. So I changed it to a series of OR screens with the results listed in descending order of "best match" first. That is, # of attributes matching out of # of attributes specified. This gives us a better "cross-sell" and ability to demonstrate what we have to offer. I did manage to carry the attributes forward so the selects are retained for refinement. I was not able to use category as that convoluted query morass is more than I wanted to tackle.
Improvements I am working on:
- Headers to separate the 100% matches from the rest
- Limit the list so only the 100% matches and the next 50 show up
- Ability to pass the search parameters to the "next page" which I currently cannot do - so that is off
- Tying the attribute search to the text search so that the user can narrow the search after either starting method
- Ajax so that I can tell the user how result set size will be
I realize that if this was an Open Source project it would get done faster but, alas, it is not my product to give away. Still, $50 was not much to get the headstart that xAttribSearch gave me.
Ok, balls in our court Gold.
Roger
Goldlion:
Good day to you all,
I (and may others) am looking for a way to duplicate the manufacturer filter and adapt the code to make it possible to filter the product listing results by attributes. In other words I want dropdowns above the product listings based on my attributes.
I anybody has a (partial) answer you can help many shop owners. Let's make this the last thread on this topic!
Greetings,
Paul
https://www.goldlion.eu
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Searching the forum/web I found this so far:
