WordPress beginner trying to figure this out

Anonymous

#30402

Hello-

I’m starting a business and trying to figure out how we want to build a website, unfortunately we can’t afford to pay someone a lot for everything we want but other sites which are non-code don’t have the features we need.

The most important part of the site is the ability to build a library of board games (roughly 800) and have a search concept like search & Filter Pro. I started our website by following an online tutorial and now I want to build the library but feel totally lost. I watched their video and said to myself “yeah I want that exact movie library that they’re showing but I’ll use it for board games” so I bought the program and now I’m lost.

Basic questions:

1. When I apply this filter to a page, what content is it searching and how do I add that content to the page? (I tried adding a gallery plug-in, and a blog loop widget, neither of them seemed to work)

2. On the Search and filter video they had a movie based post system, is that a seperate plug-in I could just add to our site or was that all coded? Is there a way to get something like that without coding everything?

Thanks, any thoughts would help.

Zach

Ross Moderator

#30546

Hi Zach

Ok, so lets reign this in a bit.

S&F is for searching different content types already existing in your website.

So, in many cases users’ already have their data – but need it searching/filtering.

As you’re starting from scratch I’ll try to give you some pointers.

Nearly all of your data will be stored as a Taxonomy or Custom Field (post meta).

You can create these easily by using other plugins as outlined here: http://www.designsandcode.com/documentation/search-filter-pro/getting-started/adding-new-fields/#Creating_More_Fields

Which type of data to use is really upto you but this post explains the difference quite well:
http://ottopress.com/2011/when-to-not-use-a-custom-taxonomy/

To create the movie demo site I actually loosely followed this article – which may help:
http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/06/04/using-custom-taxonomies-to-create-a-movie-database

You can ignore most of the code in there an use one of the plugins for creating your content types – but the principals still apply.

If you follow the above, then you can of course filter your content according to the various data you’ve setup, if you’re finding that part tricky then let me know on here once you’ve got your content/structure ready.

Hope that helps!
Thanks

Anonymous

#30754

Ross-

This was really helpful, I’ve got it up and running and filtering the way I want it too. I guess now my only question is how to change the display so that they are displaying more like a photo gallery in a grid and less like a blog roll with lots of information and space being taken up. Is there anywhere you could direct me to learn more about that? Or is it an easy change?

Thanks a bunch,

Zach

Ross Moderator

#31521

Hey Zach

Sorry for coming back to this so late.

What you are really looking for is how to create a photo gallery / grid layout in WordPress.

Creating a S&F template is just the same as a WordPress template so the same logic applies.

You can take a look at links I mentioned in this post too:

https://support.searchandfilter.com/forums/topic/search-results-as-grid/#post-24882

Thanks

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