29. Custom Search
Note
This chapter refers to add-ons that are only useable in Plone Classic.
You may check https://github.com/collective/awesome-volto/ to find out if there are add-ons for Volto that provide custom search since things are happening fast.
If the previous chapters about views and catalog-searches seem complex, the custom search add-ons shown below might be a great alternative until you feel comfortable writing views and templates.
Here are two add-ons that allow you to add custom searches and content listings through the web ("TTW", requiring no programming: only the web browser) in Plone.
29.1. eea.facetednavigation
eea.facetednavigation is a full-featured and a very powerful add-on to improve search within large collections of items.
No programming skills are required to configure it since the configuration is done TTW.
It lets you gradually select and explore different facets (metadata/properties) of the site content and narrow down you search quickly
and dynamically.
Install eea.facetednavigation
Enable it on a new folder "Discover talks" by clicking on Actions > Enable faceted navigation.
Click on the Faceted > Configure to configure it TTW.
Select 'Talk' for Portal type, hide Results per page
Add a checkboxes widget to the left and use the catalog index Audience for it.
Add a select widget for speaker
Add a radio widget for type_of_talk
Examples:
See also
We use the new catalog indexes to provide the data for the widgets and search the results.
For other use cases we could also use either the built-in vocabularies (https://pypi.org/project/plone.app.vocabularies) or create custom vocabularies for this.
29.2. collective.collectionfilter
A more lightweight solution for custom searches and faceted navigation is collective.collectionfilter.
By default it allows you to search among the results of a collection and/or filter the results by keywords, author or type.
It can also be extended quite easily to allow additional filters (like audience).
plone.org