Custom Options In Layered Navigation

Hello all,

I'm brand new to Magento and am looking to implement some custom layered navigation. By that I mean I want to be able to customize the navigation elements on the left hand side and determine what combinations of selections are possible. I also want to be able to specify SEO friendly URLs.

So my question is what's the best way to go about this?

• Plugin? I'm aware of Amasty but it doesn't quite do what I want
• Should I only be considering custom development for this?
• What are the pros and cons of either approach?
• What would be the impact on Magento updates?

I work as a Java developer so am not averse to developing it myself but want to get an idea of my options.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

 

Can you be a tad more specific as to what you want in the layered nav. I retired Magento a few years ago. That stuff is wildly complex for no real reason. You can do the same stuff with woo commerce these days at a fraction of the cost and time involved.

Happy to help though,
Nigel

 

Certainly. We're running with a vanilla installation at the moment so no customisations whatsoever.

Manufacturer
We've been able to add a manufacturer attribute to each product and add that to the default navigation menu but it's implemented as a filter. I.e. the URL remains unchanged but manufacturer is specified as a parameter e.g. shoes.html?manufacturer=7 where 7 is the id or index of said manufacturer. Ideally we'd want something like shoes/nike.html

Features
In addition we want multiple 'feature facets' which, given our example, could be shoe size, material, colour etc. The caveat here is that we only want to be able to select one feature at any given time. As with manufacturer we'd want the URL to be in a format such as shoes/black.html

Page Layouts
Based upon the feature or manufacturer selected we then want to navigate to particular page layouts. For example when a manufacturer is selected we want to navigate to a page with an overview of that manufacturer on the top with products underneath.

I hope all that makes sense. The more I look at the requirements above the more I think custom development is going to be needed.

So did you adopt WooCommerce over Magento in the end?

 

ok will read that over real fast and yes. Woo commerce is way easier to deal with and when you need to do something like this its way cheaper. You can literally do in 3 hours what takes 3 days in Magento. For instance...

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/ajax-enabled-enhanced-layered-navigation/ woo commerce already has layered navigation widgets with custom filters so you can simply select things and call it a day.
or has free plugins that do largely the same thing https://wordpress.org/plugins/yith-woocommerce-ajax-navigation/


Brand related matters can be dealt with a bunch of ways. https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-brands/8039481 cheap again for all the advanced stuff. Free one seems to do the same stuff. https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-woocommerce-brands/


shoes/nike.html wordpress basically does this with permalinks set to %postname% or you can append the urls with html if need be.

Off the top of my head since most themes for wp use visual composer it would be entirely trivial to have the main brand info there than under it you simply drag a module from visual composer underneath the brand info and it will show their products only for instance.

Hope that helps. I will see if I can sort how to fix your url/filter quandary with Magento.

Nigel

 

https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/shop-by-brands-with-layered-navigation.html Also that should solve most of your issue but not sure if that is floating around for 2.0

 

Ah cool. I'll have a proper look this evening. Thanks for taking the time to reply. It's much appreciated.

I'll post back with any progress or updates.