Support

Apologies in advance for the novice level question, my site is a personal, hobby one and I am not a web developer. Also in the past I have only used the Smart Search Menu option for my searching needs and the Smart Search Module (SSM) seems to have slightly different behaviour.

Just to start, my problems seem to occur once I try to use the SSM, e.g. entering a search term or choosing from one of the Advance Search options.

Setup

I used a JFilter Results menu item as described in the docs to provide the user menu option to initiate the search/filtering. I have limited the SM Content Map to only Authors list so the Smart Search Advanced filter will only display the Author drop-down list. 

Item 1

I do need to allow my users the option to search/filter by Author as many will be looking for specific author content. 

Without selecting any JFilter filters and just choosing an author, hitting search does display all the authors content however it does that on the home page.  I hope I am missing something simple.

Item 2

I reset the page (Hard Reset F5) and then set a JFilter filter to limit the result , which worked fine. However I tried to further filter on Author (the SSM author list) but was sent to the home page again and the list was ignoring the JFilter filter. Is there a way to use the SM advanced option or create a filter on Authors in JFilter? I don't see an option to 'create' a filter and I only have Categories, Tags and Custom Fields as options

Thank for any and all help
Cheers
Steve

Hi Steve

Some clarifications

Smart Search and JFilters are 2 distinct components. As such they use different pages/menu items for their results display.

Though the result pages of Smart Search and JFilters, look identical aesthetically, because they both call the same layouts.

Also JFilters can filter the results of the Smart Search but does NOT happen the other way (Smart Search does NOT search the JFilters results).

Regarding the Smart Search, i cannot offer much help, but the SM module is supposed to work the same way as the search and filters in the SM page. If this does not happen, please have a look at the settings of your SM module.

Regarding the "Authors" filter in JF, it is in our canidate features to allow the generation of filters from core fields like the author, but it is not yet implemented. So i suppose that you have to rely on the Smart Search filter for that atm.

Kind regards,

Thanks very much for the quick repy. I did have a feeling I was missing some fundamental concepts , I am easily confused when it comes to this stuff. Thanks in advance for your patience :-)

Re: Smart Search not search JFilter filtered items... of course, my stupidity on that one :-(

For my other question... I am assuming other users would have this need and I am wondering if the approach i need to take is something like (If not, if any users read this, how do you handle this need?):

1. Default Search menu item, without the JFilter options being displayed

2. Send those results to the JFilter Results menu item (from doc), where the result and the filtering options are display to further filter that list

tbh, not sure if I how I do that but is that the kind of setup I am looking for? Again please pardon my ignorance, just trying to get an idea of how best to improve user search experience, which accounts for 95% of why my users are there. if I have to start taking away options, its not ideal.

Cheers

Steve

Just publish your JFilters - Filters module, in the page you want to filter (e.g. Smart Search, Category blog).

Kind regards,

Thanks again, I have tried but can't get it to work. SS Menu and SS Module. Completely my fault I am sure, I just might be too much of a novice and missing basic concepts. I will try for another couple of days to see if I can get what I need. Not like its a business site or anything :-)

I really do appreciate your time

Cheers
Steve

Sorry, I meant to say you can close this ticket. I've created a Cassiopeia test site so will hopefully work things out there first then move to my actual site. 
Cheers

Steve

Fine!

I am closing the ticket.

Hope to find the way to that.

Kind regards,