Inside JXtended Finder 1.1 - Part 2 - Search Filters

Finder uses the same technology as major search engines to develop a detailed understanding of your site's content. It is a Joomla 1.5 native extension that understands your site's structure and content in a way that no other search engine can.

With the release of Finder 1.1 RC1, it is time to take another look under the hood of Finder to see what it can do. In our last article on Finder 1.1 we explained what Finder is on a high level. In this article, we will take a look at Finder's Search Filter features. What is a search filter you ask? A Search Filter allows you to limit a search to an arbitrary group of content. For example, let's say your Joomla! 1.5 site has a "Press Releases" section. A user looking for a specific press release can limit their search to the "Press Release" section of your site and only content in that section will be returned in search results. Simple, right? Great, let's see how it works.

As we explained in our last article, Finder analyzes your content directly to understand its structure. As of version 1.1, Finder will also discover organization structures like sections, categories, labels, publications, and so on to create a high level understanding of your site's structure. Finder already knew about your latest Magazine Articles but now it knows which Publication, Issue, Section, and Category they are in as well as which Author wrote it and which Labels have been applied to it. And, not only does it know about those things, it will let you search for content based on one or more of those relationships.

Search Filter criteria can be chosen by a user, an administrator, or both user and administrator. Finder allows you to create predefined search filters and attach them to search modules and/or search pages. Let's say you want to limit a search to four content categories. You can create a predefined filter in the administrator interface with those four categories selected and then attach that filter to a search module. Publish that module to a page and any search query entered into that module will be limited to those four categories. But what if you want the user to have more control over their search? Easy, you can configure the module to show your predefined filter and then a user will be able to select one of the categories from a drop down field and limit their search to one of the four categories. Sounds good, right? Well, that's just the beginning.

Let's look at some ways that Search Filters can be used to help your users find content more quickly. Let's imagine a site organized into four regional sections: North America, South America, Europe, Asia. Each of those areas has a landing page directing users to content related to that region. A user browsing the section of the site dedicated to North America probably isn't very interested in the section of the site dedicated to Asia. If the user were to search for “Volunteering" in a typical Joomla site they would see a chaotic list of up to 50 pages that have some mention of the word volunteering. While that technically works, it isn't very helpful to the user and they are likely to find the experience very frustrating. Enter Finder 1.1 and Search Filters. To solve this problem, you can create a Finder Search Module with a predefined filter of the four regional sections. Then, when a user enters their search query of “Volunteering", they can also select a region to search and they will get a nice, clean, list of articles organized in that section of the site and sorted by keyword relevance. Search bliss!

All that power and flexibility for $30 dollars is just too much. Hurry up and get your Finder Subscription today before the price goes up! Our next article will dig into what you can do with Finder with Magazine, Catalog, and Labels. Stay tuned.