Hello everyone,
This is the major update announced earlier. The amount of work involved was much larger and we could not manage it in the timeframe planned initially, but the development is finally over and we are excited to release this upgrade now.
Due to larger amount of work involved we decided the final price for the product will be 69.99 USD with 40 USD yearly renewal price. As announced before, the change of the price does not affect our existing customers in any way.
The most important and complex feature is Faceted search support. Faceted search allows users to see the number of results they would get if they would activate an option in the filter form. If enabled, this count will be shown next to each option. The product comes with options to hide the options that would end up showing no results or to grey-out these options. This is especially useful for large filter forms, that get more compact when users activate some options.
As part of this enhancement, you also get an option to show users the total number of items found next to the filter button.
Faceted search does work with the MySQL search engine, but it is recommended to use it with Elasticsearch. We can't guarantee the performance for medium and larger boards that don't use Elasticsearch.
Another import feature is location-based filtering. We have developed a separate add-on, that implements "location" custom field - a way to collect location information from users. The add-on provides full control over list of countries shown, states, cities, zip code and street address validation, etc. Please check add-on details at
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/location-custom-field-by-addonslab.7424/ You are eligible for a free license of this add-on if you purchase any of our Filter add-ons.
Once this add-on is installed, you can use a new filter type, that allows finding all items within the given range from a zip code or an address. Please note, that Google API is used for geocoding requests, so you need to create an app in
Google Cloud Console (if you don't have one), enable Geocoding API for the project, generate the credentials and set the key in the product's settings page. The instructions for this can be found at
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/get-api-key
If the search shows no results, please check your Server Logs in the Admin Panel, any API key misconfiguration will be reported there.
Once you have set it up, including geolocation API key, rebuild field indexes and search the index to update the information.
We are looking forward to your feedback and suggestions regarding the features implemented.
Important note: If you are using other filter add-ons from us, please don't upgrade showcase filter to the latest version for now. All other filter products are going to get the enhancements within some days, you can upgrade them once all products are you using got the upgrade. The safest way to upgrade them is to disable all add-ons, then upgrade them and only after the upgrade enables them.
Thank you!
