Faceted search for WordPress

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

4 thoughts on “Faceted search for WordPress”

  1. There’s also Facetious, a faceted search plugin we developed within Code For The People for client work, and have subsequently released via the WP repo and Github.

    We’ve gone for a much more straightforward approach: out of the box, there’s a WP widget allowing you to specify the post type you want to filter, and the taxonomies you want to offer as filtering options. We also allow for filtering by a search keyword, and a month of publication.

    If you’re looking for greater functional or aesthetic control, or if you want to place the search form somewhere other than a sidebar, there’s also a template tag… or for greater future-proofing, a ‘do_action’ method.

    Facetious uses the built-in WordPress search function, with all its well-known limitations; and we don’t make any attempt to show numbers of results.

    But we do include a ‘pretty permalink’ structure for search results, meaning queries can be cached easily by plugins such as WP Super Cache.

    Oh, and Facetious is 100% cheaper than FacetWP too. 🙂

    You can find Facetious in the WP plugin repo; and if you want to help us enhance it, we’d welcome your contributions via Github:

    https://github.com/cftp/facetious

    • This looks pretty nice too, Simon. You should provide a demo, more screenshots, and have a link to your plugins from your website so I can know about when you guys do awesome work 🙂

  2. Hi Simon, your plugin code looks good. I just wanted to clarify a few things.

    You suggest that Facetious is a “100% cheaper” alternative to FacetWP, which is misleading. The plugins do entirely different things.

    FacetWP brings real-time, interactive faceting to WordPress. Facets are actually “aware” of each other (as opposed to static lists / dropdowns). Traditionally, this sort of functionality depended on a dedicated search engine, such as Elastic Search.

    Facetious does make it easy to create dropdown filters, but that’s not providing the same level of interactivity that FacetWP offers.

    You gloss over the “number of results” feature, but that’s actually an important part of FacetWP. When a user interacts with a facet, all other facets on the page automatically refresh, and facets without matching content will disappear. This means that users will be able to find what they’re looking for quickly, and be less likely to run into filtering “dead-ends”.

  3. all I have to say is wow, love the ajax filtering without reload, I recently bought searchwp, and love that one too, I will have to pickup a copy of facetwp!

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