29. Custom Search
If the chapters about views 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 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 (Through-The-Web).
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 through the web.
- 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.portlet.collectionfilter
A more light-weight solution for custom searches and faceted navigation is collective.portlet.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).