Advanced Search with Finder

Finder is an advanced search extension for Joomla and is an excellent addition when using Catalog on your web site.  Finder includes a plugin to index Catalog content and Catalog also ships with the required plugins to index content when modifying catalog items (or nodes).

Finder indexes the following information in a catalog item:

• The item's abstract and body fields.
• The item's meta description and meta keywords.
• The item's list-based attributes.
• The item's free-form attributes.

Categories that the catalog item is in are also mapped so that they will be able to appear in a drop-down list in Finder's Advanced Search area.

List-based attributes are also mapped so that you can filter on the type of list in Finder's Advanced Search area.  For example, you may create a class in Catalog called "Fishing Reels".  You may also create two types of attribute lists: "Model" and "Manufacturer".  Within these two types of lists you could add all the various models and the respective manufacturers.  Finder will index these relationships so that in the Finder Advanced Search you can optionally show a list of the Manufacturers and only search for items made by, for example, Shimano.