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 Plone Classic site.

Upgrade to version 16.0+

• Version 16.x is NOT backward compatible and it works only with Python 3 / Plone 5+
• If you're upgrading from a lower version, please first install and upgrade to version 15.x` then install and upgrade to version 16+
• Upgraded the default faceted view/edit layout to Bootstrap Grid and Bootstrap Card. Thus, you will need to adjust your theme before pushing this version to production.
• Within Plone > Site setup > Add-ons click on upgrade button available for EEA Faceted Navigation

Upgrade to version 15.0+

• Version 15.x is the latest Python 2 / Plone 4 backward compatible.
• Within "Plone > Site setup > Add-ons" click on upgrade button available for EEA Faceted Navigation
• Plone4: After running the upgrade step, check CSS/JS order within ZMI > portal_css / portal_javascript

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:

1. Easy customizable GUI via drag-n-drop, no restart needed.
2. Facets can be set to fixed default values and hidden.
3. Facets can be placed in standard search or extended search panels, to not intimidate novice users and have cleaner interface
4. Facets can be displayed via several widgets like select, radio, text input, tag cloud, date range and more
5. Expandable and collapsible widgets with many values
6. Automatically counts number of content items beside each facet value
7. Possibility to show or hide the options with zero results (show only the facets which return content)
8. Ability to create your custom content types definition to be used as a combination of interface and portal type, presented in a single widget.
9. Export of search result in RSS.
10. Pleasant user interface based on Ajax JQuery, implemented with "deep linking", so bookmarking a faceted query works, browser history supported.
11. Export / Import of faceted settings as XML. Useful to replicate same facets navigation on another site.
12. Search engine friendly, disabling javascript acts as a normal collection batch list.
13. Synchronization of settings across multiple languages, I18N support.
14. High performance by caching faceted catalog queries via distributed memory object caching system: memcached
15. 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)
16. Ability to transform faceted navigable items in search forms by putting them in the 'search mode' (starting with version 4.6)
17. 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

• With pip:

  bin/pip install eea.facetednavigation
  

• Try it with docker:

  docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 -e SITE="Plone" -e ADDONS="eea.facetednavigation" -e PROFILES="eea.facetednavigation:default" plone/plone-backend
  

• Login to http://localhost:8080/Plone/login (admin:admin)

• Install EEA Faceted Navigation` via Site Setup > Add-ons

Develop

• See DEVELOP.md

Getting started

• Go to Site Setup > Content Types and select Page
• Go to Behaviors and enable Faceted navigable behavior
• Go to your working space and add a Page and within Actions menu click on Enable faceted navigation.

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 requirements.txt and constraints.txt:

  bin/pip install collective.solr
  

• 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, just import it to your webpack bundle and make the bundle depend on plone:

import 'select2/select2_locale_fr';

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
  • collective.solr
• Customized vocabularies
  • collective.taxonomy
  • Products.ATVocabularyManager (Plone 4)
• Multilingual/translation solution
  • plone.app.multilingual
  • Products.LinguaPlone (Plone 3 & 4)
• Cache (memcache)
  • eea.cache
• 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

• EEA Publications
• EEA Multimedia
• University of Minnesota - Explore Books
• The Mountaineers

Source code

• Plone 2 and 3 on github
• Plone 4 on github
• Plone 5+ on github

Eggs repository

• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/eea.facetednavigation
• http://eggrepo.eea.europa.eu/simple

Plone versions

It has been developed and tested for Plone 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

How to contribute

See the contribution guidelines (CONTRIBUTING.md).

Other resources

• Faceted navigation pattern
• 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)