A Features List for Focus
- Indexes (and therefore allows searching in) all of the product's fields as well as the attributes and options and Merchant custom fields.
- The search can be restricted to individual (or multiple) of the product fields, custom fields, and categories
- Indexes the category data, including the category name, code, and header & footer and results from category hits are separately listed on the page.
- The module tabulates which categories the found products are assigned to and can list them. A "These products found in categories:" feature.
- The results can be sorted by any of the product fields, including the custom fields, and options can be offered to the customer to change the sort order with radio buttons, a select list, specific links which set the sort order, or links which toggle the sort order. They are returned from the searcher sorted by "Relevance" and this too is a sort option.
- The module lets you maintain any number of templates and you can call these templates in from any page in Merchant. So you can have an advanced search page with all of the bells and whistles, a simplified search page with most of the options "pre-set" for the customer, a search page which only searches a particular category, or a search page which doesn't look like a search page at all and is actually a listing of all products in a particular category (or categories). The potential is huge and as with our 4.x Search Manager I suspect that many wonderful things will be done with the module I can't even imagine.
- Each template has a separate "html" and "css" component. When you save the template and it's css, a .css file is created which is called in when that template is used to display the page.
- Templates can be inserted into other templates. So if your search page is getting difficult to maintain or you want to only temporarily add a feature, you can store parts of the page in other templates and insert those templates into the main template.
- Templates themselves can be exported and imported directly in the module's admin. Ultimately we will offer downloads of customized search pages (and perhaps a market will grow for them) which you add to the module simply by importing them (multiple templates can be stored in a single import file).
- Templates can be previewed from within the module's admin without having to make it the "Live" template in the store so you can tinker with the layout and see how it will look without subjecting your customers to the new design until it is ready to go.
- Results can be displayed in a list, or in a grid (of any number of columns) and you can offer the display method as an option to the customer. The default template comes with a selectable option of displaying the results as a list or as a 3-across grid but you can add as many different display options as you want.
- Because the entire page is template controlled almost all of the search options can be customized with your own html and Javascript (which also opens things up to adding many more features in the future).
- If no search results are found the module can suggest alternatives that are close to your original spelling. A "Did you mean..." feature.
- The module offers an advanced set of options which provides you with control of how the individual field are indexed. With this you can boost individual product fields (want the "name" to be more relevant when determining the first products shown when sorted by relevance? boost it). You can also boost individual products! Want to feature a particular brand of Toy Train in your store when someone searches for "toy" or "train"? This can be accomplished by setting up a custom field with Merchant's "Custom Fields" module and telling the module that you want to use that field to boost the individual product's in the search results. Give those trains you need to move a boost of 100 and leave everything else at 1...they're sure to show up at the top.
- You can also boost individual terms while searching (although there are no specific tokens for it yet, it can be done by adding your own form fields). So you can set up a specialized search for "Toy Train" that will give more relevance to products which contain "train" than those containing "toy".
- The module has the option to log all searches to a text file. The actual data to be logged is "Template driven" but by default it logs the date, the search term, and the total hits returned. The module can provide you with a download link for the log file directly in it's admin.
- The module uses the Ruby Ferret search library and has about any feature you could want in a search feature. Although not all of them have been specifically implemented in the template as search features" offered to the customer, almost all can be offered by adding your own form fields to the templates. For example, the search engine can handle "fuzzy" searching and although there is currently no token in the template for "fuzzy search field", you could add your own html which sets the SearchTerm to something like:
"hot chocolate"~3
which would find all products with the words "hot" and "chocolate" within three words of each other. Similarly, the searcher supports wildcards, such as Mo*ay, which would find everyone's favorite eel and day of the week.