EEA Faceted Navigation (FacetedNav)

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 site.

Contents

Contents

• EEA Faceted Navigation (FacetedNav)
• Contents
• Main features
• Extra
• Screenshots
• Live demo
• Buildout installation
• Source code
• Eggs repository
• Plone versions
• Known bugs and ongoing development
• Copyright and license
• Other resources

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 from version 4.6)
16. Ability to transform faceted navigable items in search forms by putting them in the 'search mode' (starting with version 4.6)

Extra

You can extend faceted navigation functionality by installing the following addons:

• Customized vocabularies

  • Products.ATVocabularyManager

• Multilingual/translation solution

  • Products.LinguaPlone

• Syndication

  • Products.basesyndication
  • Products.fatsyndication
  • bda.feed

• Cache (memcache)

  • plone.memoize
  • lovely.memcached
  • eea.cache

• Relations

  • eea.relations

• Faceted extensions

  • eea.faceted.tool
  • eea.faceted.inheritance

• Faceted themes

  • eea.faceted.blue

Screenshots

See more FacetedNavigationScreenshots.

Live demo

Here some live production demos:

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

Buildout installation

• Plone 2 and 3 - Buildouts: http://svn.eionet.europa.eu/repositories/Zope/trunk/eea.facetednavigation/buildouts - Trac: http://svn.eionet.europa.eu/projects/Zope/browser/trunk/eea.facetednavigation/buildouts
• Plone 4+ - Buildout: http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/eea.facetednavigation/buildout - Trac: http://dev.plone.org/collective/browser/eea.facetednavigation/buildout

Source code

• Plone 2 and 3: - Latest source code in EEA svn: https://svn.eionet.europa.eu/repositories/Zope/trunk/eea.facetednavigation/
• Plone 4+ - Collective: https://github.com/collective/eea.facetednavigation

Eggs repository

• http://eggrepo.eea.europa.eu/simple

Plone versions

It has been developed and tested for Plone 2, 3 and 4. See buildouts section above.

Known bugs and ongoing development

Bugs and new features are entered on our Trac server at EEA.

• open bugs / tasks
• complete list of bugs / features including fixed and open

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.

Other resources

• Faceted navigation pattern
• Faceted classification
• Flamenco faceted navigation made at University of Berkeley
• A simpler Faceted plone 3 product made 2008
• Folder navigation (GSoC) A new product Folder Navigation in early development]
• Exhibit Client based faceted navigation via javascript