28. Custom Search

28.1. Custom Search in Volto

Volto has (since Volto 14) a search block that allows you to build custom searches without additional addons.

28.1.1. Exercise

Show talks on the talks page with a search block. The visitor should see a filter for the type of talk (Keynote, Talk, Lightning Talk).

You can add facets in the sidebar, but "type of talk" is not available. What is necessary to implement?

Remember what we did to show featured content on the front page.

Tips for a Solution

• The field "type_of_talk" needs to be indexed in catalog.

• "type_of_talk" needs to be a collection criterion

After adding an index and a criterion, and restarting the backend, and re-installing the add-on, the index is present in catalog but empty.

For populating the index you can go to http://localhost:8080/Plone/portal_catalog/manage_catalogIndexes and reindex the new index.

In case you want to change something of the index, the index can be deleted. A re-start of the backend, a re-install of the add-on and a new re-index of the index will populate the index.

Check the entries by switching to "Browse" button.

Solution

catalog.xml

  <index name="type_of_talk" meta_type="KeywordIndex">
    <indexed_attr value="type_of_talk"/>
  </index>
  <column value="type_of_talk"/>

querystring.xml

  <records interface="plone.app.querystring.interfaces.IQueryField"
           prefix="plone.app.querystring.field.type_of_talk">
      <value key="title" i18n:translate="">Type of Talk</value>
      <value key="enabled">True</value>
      <value key="sortable">False</value>
      <value key="operations">
        <element>plone.app.querystring.operation.selection.any</element>
        <element>plone.app.querystring.operation.selection.all</element>
        <element>plone.app.querystring.operation.selection.none</element>
      </value>
     <value key="group" i18n:translate="">Metadata</value>
     <value key="vocabulary">ploneconf.types_of_talk</value>
  </records>

28.2. Custom Search in Plone Classic

If the Plone Classic chapters about Views (Views II: A Default View for "Talk") and catalog-searches ((Views III: A Talk List)) 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.

28.2.1. 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:

• https://www.dipf.de/en/research/current-projects

• https://www.mountaineers.org/courses/courses-clinics-seminars

• https://www.dyna-jet.com/highpressurecleaner

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.

• Custom vocabularies TTW using collective.taxonomy

• Programming using Vocabularies: https://docs.plone.org/external/plone.app.dexterity/docs/advanced/vocabularies.html

28.2.2. 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).