MOD: Refine Search Improvement

One of the most interesting tools included in Classipress is the ‘Refine Search’ form to refine the results inside a category or subcategory selections. Most users are very familiar with this feature, that allows to include a set of custom fields in our form layout, in order to allow the final user to refine the category results handling the values of these custom fields we have defined in the form layout and activated to be availables in the refine search tool for a category or a set of them.

But from our point of view there is a problem in this tool that could be confusing for the users that are using this tool. When the user select a category and Classipress shows the Ads for this selected category, the refine search form includes, for every custom field included in this refine search, the whole range of values for all the custom fields in the site, regardless of the selected category. To see this problem, we can see the following example:

In the above example, we can see how confusing it can be for the user, i.e for the custom field price. The minimum and maximun prices for the current category are $40 -$220 but the slider bar to refine the price goes from $10-$1000 because it takes the minimum and maximum values for all the ads in the site. The problem gets worse if we are selling, i.e Cars and Stamps, where the prices may vary much more.

At Classipro, we’ve implement a mod to solve that and makes the range fits better these values, as you can see in the following screenshot: