A particular client seems to be enjoying asking me for the impossible this week. I’m clueless as to the possibility of this, but I’ll ask in case anyone can point me in the right direction, or even rule it out.

You’d get a page of search results as usual, but could then sort the delivered results, a bit like dynamic weblog parameters. Ideally the ability to sort by weblog, date, author, title etc. I know Robin went a little way towards this in this thread

Or as a worst-case scenario, is it poss for me to use furthr templates or segments to adjust the orderby parameters do you think?
I’m properly stressed about this project, so any help or advice would be gratefully received…

Page is way out of date, but do you mean like this or this?

Oh blimey Lisa. Nice. Erm, first of your links if poss - a simple dropdown would work perfectly.

I see that uses custom fields too, although I only need to sort by title, author, date - and possibly weblog (the latter would be a huge bonus)...

All I’m doing is passing the parameters I need to change via segments:

and

This isn’t on search results, though.  So it depends what you need, really.  You can change anything you have as a parameter, really.  I just didn’t need to.

Ah, I see. You are using weblog tags. I gotta do this with search results. Given me some ideas though. Thanks for sharing…

I kind of found a way, basically using some source code from the advanced search template (not EE tags as I wanted control over a few bits and pieces, but I’m sure most people could do what they wanted with teh EE tags) at the top of my results template, pulling in the keyword(s) into the hidden keywords field.

Thus, the user gets to use a few advanced search features to refine an existing search.

You can see it at New Consumer which just launched.

Now that is just pretty damn cool.  You’re going to write this up somewhere right? Like ... the wiki? *ducks*

When I get a chance, I sure will… probably by 2009!!!

*grins* At least it’s here to be found now. Thank you for posting it. =)

Short note at the wiki for now:

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Dynamically_Sortable_Search_Results/

So Lisa, any chance you’ll share the code for the 2nd option that you alluded to here in the post above?

I want to be able to have a dropdown for sorting the list by category and even using a few of the custom fields in the entries. For instance, if this is my results table:

title | author | series
——————————
one | steve | fall
two | steve | fall
red | john | fall
blue | john | spring
grey | ana | spring

i want to have several dropdowns where the user can select to show posts by: author or series. So if they select author > john it shows this:

———————-
red | john | fall
blue | john | spring

The series would actually be done using categories and the author would probably be a custom field in the entry. I’m assuming I can do that with your second example but am at a loss on how to set it up. Please save me!!!!

That page just uses dynamic parameters almost cut and pasted from the docs. =)

Yes! Thank you for this, it works great and is really easy to tweak and abuse for whatever you need. Colly/Pittock - how is your sausage so strong?

At long last, a refound article I had earmarked yonks ago.

Next: how would I go about filtering search results by custom_field. Please don’t say custom sql queries and a smattering of php…

EDIT: Doh, hadn’t scrolled fully. Ignore

Well, use the search: parameter - that didn’t exist back when this post was written though.  And again, that uses the weblog entries tag, not the search results themselves.

I think I need a bit of guidance. My current search/results page is already a little complicated to start with. Basically, I have surrounded each weblog’s results with “if” statements in order to output a whole range of information (custom_fields), relative category urls and custom entry paths. Broadly it looks like this:

As you can see, I’ve added in vain the custom_fields option in the dynamic parameter for each outputted weblog tag. Where / how would you suggest I add the search:parameter and link that to the select drop down menu in the Filtering Form. Obviously I’ve also been aimlessly stabbing around at the select options for “venue-standing-capacity” custom field. I’ve ignored the fact that this is only applicable to the “Venues” site section for now. And of course there are 3 kinds of Capacity types (standing, meeting, sitting). As long as one of them works I’ll be halfway there.

I’m also weary that I may have to create new custom fields for the Capacity types: dropdown selections with pre-formatted ranges (0-100, 101-500, etc). At the moment the client manually inputs a number for each type. Then again a search:venue-capacity-standing=“00” may do the trick. Since all values end in “00”.