Advanced Search - by just pushing a button

[Art Zeugen]

Hi. We have a cunning search plan and wondered if anyone might have any ideas which could help us please.

We would ideally like to have a row of buttons, one entitled "ABC >" which would search a particular section or group of products alphabetically, another called "ABC <" doing the reverse, one called "Price >" listing products with prices ascending and a fourth "Price <" for prices descending. We would then set up similar buttons on each section page. Through looking at the Advanced User Guide we can see how to do more complicated searches via a form but just not quite what we need - i.e. we need to be able to specify that field X has condition Y for button Z. We understand that this has come up a couple of times before and that "Development" described a solution involving the cgi scripts.

We have experience of customising many aspects of Actinic so are more than happy to edit templates, cgi etc etc. We love the way customisation can give you a really different looking site yet still have the robust strength of Actinic+Sage and suspect that search can be similarly customised if we knew what to tweak !

Does anyone know how we can acheive what we need please ? We don't mind how, providing Actinic is the main catalog vehicle. Click on a button and results appear - no drop downs etc.

Thanks,

Art Zeugen

[I-CC]

Actinic search functions and the display of items within a section does not have sort abilities, which is what I think you are after.

i.e. when a search is conducted using the normal search functions, it spits out the results based on first come and found type of thing, and can not display them based on price ascending or descending, which is also true for displaying products within a section, i.e. sorting of those products is not possible with the default mode.

There is however a work in progress by a developer who frequents the forum which provides this type of sort enabled ability, but it is not for the would-be Actinic site operator and requires more than a stab at doing things and a (when we looked at it) developer to develop using it..

Not sure where it went, but the developer is on this forum very often, so if he see's this (which he no doubt will) he will advise on it for you, but it is not standard and has been developed by him at great expense in time, so would not be a community freebie most likely, as something like this is more specialised for the general actinic site..

[Art Zeugen]

Thanks very much for the reply. We're not after a freebie necessarily here - I suspected that it wasn't as straightforward as it might sound. We have come across one possible 3rd party solution which has been undergoing some work - if anyone comes across anything else, please let us know.

Thanks very much.

Art Zeugen

[richardh9999]

I would really like something along these lines too and, like you, don't mind paying for something if it's good, does the job, saves me time and hopefully brings in more sales !!

We sell envelopes online and a lot of people say they wish they could find what they want by size. They can if they go to the advanced search but people don't look !!

So I'd like to have a feature, possibly within my menu system, that allowed people to search on size, possibly even within certain boundaries (e.g. +/- 5mm).

The alternative for me is to produce duplicates of every item but since we have around 1400 products and rising almost daily, that would seem to be unnecessaily arduous !

If anyone has any brilliant ideas please let me know !

Best wishes to all
Richard