Thread

I’m currently in the process of developing an art gallery site and wanted to see if the EE community had any suggestions/recommendations for developing an advanced search feature.

Basically we would like to give the user the ability to search from a number of fields. For example, visitors could select from one or more different product types (art prints, fine art, sculpture, etc.), genres (contemporary, art nouveau, impressionism, etc.), Subject options (abstract, botanical, landscapes, etc.), Shape (square, rectangle, narrow, etc.), Color (black, red, blue, etc.), and size (small, medium, large, etc.). Depending on what they selected the results would show.

They could then continue the filtering if desired. For example, If the search results showed all the artwork that had a subject of “botanicals”, they could then select “square” from the shape field to see all the art that matched “botanical” and “square”.

My question: Is there specific extensions you would recommend (Low Search, Super Search, etc.). In addition, what’s your recommendation for the admin in how the would classify each piece? Matrix?

I’m sure there are several ways of doing this but I just wanted to see if anyone had experience doing this and if so, what they would recommend. Thanks for your time!

Have you looked at http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/dynamic_parameters.html - you can use that to filter results. If it’s not powerful enough then Solspace Super Search may fit the bill.

With these sort of things I’d use categories for one attribute (product types), then custom channel fields for everything else, eg colour, size, shape.

Hi there Rob. I was wondering what kind of workflow you ended up using. My group is currently working on a Gallery site as well. It is not a commercial site, more for educational purposes. We are working with Matrix to display all of the artwork using parent categories and then two levels of sub-categories, with each entry corresponding to one of those.

For example:
Gallery>Painting>Surrealism

Where Surrealism is an entry with Matrix rows.

The problem we are facing is during search. We would like to perform a search that returns a specific row inside of our Matrix and therefore display a specific painting during search results.

Any suggestions?

Vanessa at Crisálide

We ended up using Low Search, Channel Images and Playa and it’s working really well. Attached is a screen shot of the Post page to give you an idea. If you want to see it in action go to http://stellersgallery.com/artists and select Filter Art on the right side.