Do you ever need to build a site that lets visitors search for something? Properties, doctors, courses, you name it. Views plugin lets you build your own fully custom searches, fully compatible with WPML.
If you’ve seen Views already, the big new features in this release are the AJAX updates for results and automatic-limiting for filter options. Sounds geeky? Well, of course 🙂
In the video, we show a real estate site, where visitors can search properties by location, number of rooms and price range. You will notice that when I change the location, the available options for number of rooms and price range update automatically. It’s barely noticeable on the screen, but has a huge usability impact. Visitors feel ‘natural’ with this kind of search. They don’t need to go back and forth between different filter options, hoping to finally find something. As soon as they set one filter, the others immediately adjust to show only valid results.
The AJAX updates for the results are just the icing on the cake. It adds to the user experience, by immediately showing the results, as you filter.
Views lets you build these parametric searches for any content type, with any filtering that you choose. The filter fields output with the most basic HTML, letting you add your own styling. We think that it’s easier to add styling than to remove it.
And, it’s all fully compatible with WPML. Anything that you build with Views is 100% translatable.
You’re invited to read more in the announcement blog post for Views 1.6.1. If you’re interested, there’s also a tutorial on building parametric searches with Views.
Questions? Ideas? Questions? Leave your comments and I’ll get back to you.