I was wondering if anyone could share his/her thoughts with me with regards to the following…
I want to offer my visitors the possibility to drill down into content using their own criteria. For example, if you want to know which editorial systems are suitable for small to medium-sized organisations, I could offer you a form with a number of “questions” you fill in, and based on your answers, you would get a list with systems that I advise are good for small to medium-sized publishers.
My first thought was to handle this using phpQ, a survey tool that allows for question branches, so that if you say “I only want to know about small solutions”, I can branch to that part of the survey and end up with an answer that makes sense to you.
However, phpQ doesn’t allow me to also show you a list of entries that I’ve published on your topic of interest—for that to happen, I would have to write a program that links the phpQ results to the EE database, and I lack the know-how and the skills to do so.
As I believe in the most simple answers to a problem anyway, I was now thinking about setting up a number of pre-defined search forms. People would then only have to make a selection out of a dozen or so forms. Clicking on the form that is closest to what they need to find (e.g. only entries where the product has an “Editor’s Choice”) would then open a page with an Advanced Search form where they could enter some more details like the product’s purpose, and the system would then return the entries that are relevant to them.
The problem that I now have is that I don’t see how I can customise the Advanced Search form so that it will let me add hidden fields that restrict the search to specific entry field values, etc.
I hope what I’m trying to do makes sense, although I don’t know—and that’s where I would like to get some advice and opinions—if my approach would make sense at all…