Can't get filter results to show consistently

Pamella Neely

#1793

Hello.

I’ve got your plugin working about 70% of the way – got the appearance of the filter to show fine, and occasionally I can get the filter results to show… but only one out of every 6 times.

You can see the filter here: http://pamneely.com/blog/. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and look in the right column.

I’m using the custom template my-templateslist_tactic_database.php for results, with the slug http://pamneely.com/test-database

The filter is set to load results using ajax and and auto submit the form.

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks for your help!

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Ross Moderator

#1794

Hey Pamella, your ajax container selector (i think) doesn’t appear on the page, so the plugin tries to load the results into a div that doesn’t exist.

You could try changing the content selector from #content to main.content which seems to be the main wrapper for your content.

Let me know if this works.

Thanks

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Pamella Neely

#1795

It worked! Thank you very much!

Two more questions, if you don’t mind:

1) Is there a way to get the filter to automatically update as I change choices for how it filters (not on the settings page, but on the user-facing widget)? The documentation seemed to suggest that’s possible. The form settings have “auto submit form” checked. But right now I have to click the filter button again to see any changes. It’s not an essential thing, but it would be great to see the results update automatically.

2) The taxonomy headings aren’t showing on the filter. I’ve added text in each taxonomy heading field. Am I missing something?

Really appreciate the help. Thank you again.

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Ross Moderator

#1805

Hey Pamella

From looking at your link it looks like the results auto update, when you make selections? Try clearing your cache and checking again.

RE the headings – they are there but your theme is hiding them – try changing the colour of those headings to black to make them visible again – something like this in your css:

.searchandfilter h4
{
    color:#000000;
}

🙂

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Pamella Neely

#1823

Thanks Ross – all fixed.

The filter itself now works perfectly. My next stumbling block is getting the output to show up the way I had hoped.

Right now the output is not broken (big plus!), but it’s a list of all the posts. They are showing full length, so it makes for what looks like a very long column of words. I’d like it to show the posts in a grid format.

I’ve set featured images for all the posts/content types that are being filtered. Can you give me any tips/direction on how to get the filter output to show either as a grid, or even as a list with excerpts with the featured image and the content title? I believe I need to create a custom template for this, or find a plugin to do it. I’ve been working on the template, but I’m still pretty confused.

There are a number of grid plugins listed on this page. http://www.wptemplate.com/plugins/wordpress-grid-plugins.html. Do you know if any of them would work well with your plugin’s output?

Thanks for your help. You’ve made a great plugin. Yours is the third one I’ve tested that does this sort of filtering. I’ve disabled the other two plugins I tried.

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Ross Moderator

#1824

Hey Pamella

Thanks, always nice to hear positive feedback 🙂

RE your issues… basically customising the results page is as you mention to do with template development which is slightly out of the ‘realm’ of support for this plugin but I can point you in the right direction.

Basically, the results template works the same as a post archive page, which means that is uses the main loop to display your posts – therfore some of those plugin for sure won’t be compatible, because they run their own queries to get results so bear this in mind when going forward.

RE the post content displaying, take a look at the WordPress documentation about the loop – you can use all the functions/template tags from here (http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop) so to display an excerpt rather than the full content replace the_content() with the_excerpt() – just check the docs.

To display results in a grid like fashion I think these tutorials will help:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-a-grid-display-of-post-thumbnails-in-wordpress-themes/

http://www.transformationpowertools.com/wordpress/posts-in-columns-a-new-twist-on-an-old-problem or http://www.transformationpowertools.com/wordpress/playing-with-columns-stacking-posts-grid-style

What I’m sure would be even better would be using a masonry style layout, but this is more difficult and requires more work, so depends on how comfortable you are coding – there are plenty of tutorials out there if you just google “display posts as masonry” – and look for tutorial not plugins which will often not use the main loop.

Thanks

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Tyler Morrison

#6614

Hi Pamella,

Great site! I too am looking to have a grid-like results page. I am somewhat familiar with CSS; that is, once I see it implemented, I am able to tweak it. However, I am not at the point where I can just whip up fresh code.

If it’s not too much trouble, could you give some guidance on how you made yours into the grid layout?

Also, Ross, I have done hours of searching and could not find any help on this issue. To your knowledge, is there a thread on here explaining how to do this?

My site is located at: http://tjmpropertygroup.com/philadelphia-condos/rittenhouse-square/

Thank you both,
Tyler

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Ross Moderator

#6615

Hi Tyler

Take a look at the links I left for Pamella above – layout out results in a grid format is pretty much a html/css task, with a small amount of modification to make those layouts work with WP, the links I sent above should help you get setup – I haven’t written anything myself just yet.

Thanks

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Tyler Morrison

#6620

I tried using those as a guide, actually, and yet I still cannot figure it out! I’ll keep at it, I suppose.

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