EEA Faceted Navigation
The EEA Faceted Navigation (FacetedNav) gives you a very powerful interface to improve search within large collections of items. No programming skills are required by the website manager to configure the faceted navigation interface, configuration is done TTW. It lets you gradually select and explore different facets (metadata/properties) of the site content and narrow down you search quickly and dynamically.
On the contrary, plone collections are static, in a way that the site admin decides the search criteria and the end user is not able to further sort or filter the presented results.
FacetedNav is fully customizable, site admin may decide that some criteria (facets) must have fixed values while other may be presented as filter options to the web visitor.
FacetedNav may very well replace the standard collection content type, since it covers same functionality and it adds a lot more features.
FacetedNav can also be used as an advanced search for your site.
Contents
Upgrade to version 10.0+
- Within "Plone > Site setup > Add-ons" click on upgrade button available for EEA Faceted Navigation;
- Only if the above step didn't work for you. Within "Plone > Site setup > Add-ons" uninstall EEA Faceted Navigation and Install it again;
- If you have third-party Faceted Navigation Widgets (registered outside eea.facetednavigation package) you will need to upgrade them to z3c.form and explicitly register JS/CSS resources within registry.xml/cssregistry.xml/jsregistry,xml Take faceted text widget as an example;
Main features
It comes with plenty of configuration options and features like:
- Easy customizable GUI via drag-n-drop, no restart needed.
- Facets can be set to fixed default values and hidden.
- Facets can be placed in standard search or extended search panels, to not intimidate novice users and have cleaner interface
- Facets can be displayed via several widgets like select, radio, text input, tag cloud, date range and more
- Expandable and collapsible widgets with many values
- Automatically counts number of content items beside each facet value
- Possibility to show or hide the options with zero results (show only the facets which return content)
- Ability to create your custom content types definition to be used as a combination of interface and portal type, presented in a single widget.
- Export of search result in RSS.
- Pleasant user interface based on Ajax JQuery, implemented with "deep linking", so bookmarking a faceted query works, browser history supported.
- Export / Import of faceted settings as XML. Useful to replicate same facets navigation on another site.
- Search engine friendly, disabling javascript acts as a normal collection batch list.
- Synchronization of settings across multiple languages, I18N support.
- High performance by caching faceted catalog queries via distributed memory object caching system: memcached
- Smart facets hiding - hide facets criteria if there is only one page of results (This can be explicitly disabled/enabled from version 4.6. It is also disabled by default for new faceted navigable pages starting with version 5.2)
- Ability to transform faceted navigable items in search forms by putting them in the 'search mode' (starting with version 4.6)
- Ability to enable/disable Plone portlets left and right columns within faceted navigable contexts (starting with version 4.1. Both disabled by default for new faceted navigable pages starting with version 5.2)
Install
Add eea.facetednavigation to your eggs section in your buildout and re-run buildout:
[buildout] eggs += eea.facetednavigation
You can download a sample buildout from:
Or via docker:
$ docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e ADDONS="eea.facetednavigation" plone
Install EEA Faceted Navigation within Site Setup > Add-ons
Getting started
- Go to your working space and add a Folder and within Actions menu click on Enable faceted navigation. See more on the dedicated youtube channel: EEA Web Systems Training
Faceted settings
Faceted settings is a menu that appears once you enable Faceted navigation within your context next to the Actions menu and it allows you to perform the following actions:
Configure
Configure Faceted Navigation TTW.
Enable/disable left portlets
This allows you to gain more space for faceted navigation pages by disabling Plone portlets left column.
Default: disabled (starting with version 5.2)
Enable/disable right portlets
This allows you to gain more space for faceted navigation pages by disabling Plone portlets right column.
Default: disabled (starting with version 5.2)
Enable/disable smart facets hiding
Hide facets criteria if there is only one page of results.
Default: disabled (starting with version 5.2)
Autocomplete widget
Setup
You can enhance and boost search by replacing ZCatalog with Apache Solr, see collective.solr. Thus:
Add collective.solr to your eggs section in your buildout and re-run buildout:
[buildout] eggs += collective.solr
With Plone 5 you'll need to use a more recent version:
[versions] collective.solr = >= 8.0.0b1
Start solr:
$ docker run -p 8983:8983 eeacms/solr
Install collective.solr within Site Setup > Add-ons
Setup and reindex Solr within Site Setup > Solr settings
Add or replace Text widgets with Text field with suggestions within your faceted enabled items.
i18n
To include a specific select2 locale, French for instance, you can add a resource ++resource++select2/select2_locale_fr.js in portal_javascripts (Plone 4). It needs to be after the select2.min.js resource. (You need eea.jquery 8.7 minimum)
Suggestions
You can add a new autocomplete source by registering a IAutocompleteSuggest browser view, you can see an example in eea/facetednavigation/tests/autocomplete.py and eea/facetednavigation/tests/autocomplete.zcml
You also need to configure Solr to include /suggest requestHandler. Within your solrconfig.xml add:
<!-- eea.facetednavigation autocomplete -->
<searchComponent name="suggest" class="solr.SpellCheckComponent">
<lst name="spellchecker">
<str name="name">suggest</str>
<str name="classname">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.Suggester</str>
<str name="lookupImpl">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.fst.WFSTLookupFactory</str>
<str name="field">Title</str>
<float name="threshold">0.005</float>
<str name="buildOnCommit">true</str>
</lst>
</searchComponent>
<requestHandler name="/suggest" class="org.apache.solr.handler.component.SearchHandler">
<lst name="defaults">
<str name="spellcheck">true</str>
<str name="spellcheck.dictionary">suggest</str>
<str name="spellcheck.count">10</str>
<str name="spellcheck.onlyMorePopular">true</str>
<str name="wt">xml</str>
</lst>
<arr name="components">
<str>suggest</str>
</arr>
</requestHandler>
Extra
You can extend faceted navigation functionality by installing the following add-ons:
- Enhanced text search with autocompletion support
- Customized vocabularies
- Multilingual/translation solution
- plone.app.multilingual
- Products.LinguaPlone (Plone 3 & 4)
- Cache (memcache)
- Relations
- eea.relations (Plone 4)
- Extensions
- eea.faceted.inheritance
- eea.facetednavigationtaxonomiccheckbox
- collective.eeafaceted.collectionwidget
- collective.eeafaceted.layoutwidget
- collective.eeafaceted.batchactions
- collective.eeafaceted.dashboard
- collective.eeafaceted.z3ctable
- collective.faceted.datewidget
- collective.geo.faceted
- collective.contact.facetednav
- Themes
- eea.faceted.blue (Plone 4)
Diazo
To gain performance, you can disable diazo theme on faceted results ajax requests. Go to "configuration registry" on control panel, select the key "Disable diazo rules on ajax requests" and set it True. Be sure you do not actually need it.
Live demo
Buildout installation
Source code
Eggs repository
Plone versions
It has been developed and tested for Plone 2, 3, 4 and 5. See buildouts section above.
How to contribute
See the contribution guidelines (CONTRIBUTING.md).
Other resources
- Faceted navigation pattern
- Faceted classification
- Flamenco faceted navigation made at University of Berkeley
- A simpler Faceted plone 3 product made 2008
- Folder navigation (GSoC) A new product Folder Navigation in early development]
- Exhibit Client based faceted navigation via javascript
Copyright and license
The EEA Faceted Navigation (the Original Code) is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.
The Initial Owner of the Original Code is European Environment Agency (EEA). Portions created by Eau de Web are Copyright (C) 2009 by European Environment Agency. All Rights Reserved.
Funding
EEA - European Environment Agency (EU)