I’ve just published on GitHub an improved versione of the Facets plugin, originally developed by https://github.com/AR2L.
The plugin allows to refine Items browsing via a block of dropdown lists of available values. List of elements is now fully configurable, as it sorting order and other details.
I believe this version addresses also the positioning issue reported by @Lissmarie in Move position of Facets, as it can use a custom hook instead of the public_items_browse one.
I’ve submitted a pull request to the original developer to merge the code; in the meantime, if anybody will have a chance to further test my version and report possible issues, that’d be really appreciated. The improved plugin version can be found at https://github.com/DBinaghi/omeka-facets-plugin.
Thanks to @jflatnes (How to loop through ALL and JUST searched Items?), I could improve the way the plugin is taking into account already existing filters, so there should be no issue now with very large Items subsets. New files are already on GitHub.
Now the plugin features different layouts, to better adapt to horizontal and vertical layout themes.
Release version is 2.2 (https://github.com/DBinaghi/plugin-Facets/releases/tag/v2.2), just submitted for Omeka plugins list, should appear there soon.
The new version of the facets plugin is working great for me and offers an easy way to more easily direct searches for users than the traditional Omeka “advanced search”.
One question, is there an easy enough way to reorganize the order in which the fields appear in the form? It looks like the default runs through the Dublin Core fields in order and then any customized fields that have been created. Not vital, but would be nice to be able to display fields that were more likely to be used higher in the form.
Thanks for your comments, I’m glad the plugin works well for your needs.
Your suggestion is a good one. Tecnically, it should not be too much work to make the order rearrangeable, similary to the way the main public navigation menu can be rearranged; the biggest problem would be a graphical one: as it is now, elements are divided by set (Dublin Core, then Item Type, then extras); reordering should allow to ignore set but that would mess up with the way they are presented in config page.
I’ll think about it; should you come up with a graphical solution please share it.
I’ve just noticed and fixed a couple of bugs when browsing directly from /items or /collections urls (i.e. when not followed by /browse).
Newest release is now 2.7.
