Drop down to sort listings

[chrisst1 +]

Hi all

Is it possible to have a drop down to sort listings, has anybody done this or would it not work?

Chris

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

Many questions such as this go unanswered, because the poster doesn't provide any information for someone to even attempt to answer the question.

What version of the software are you using?
What template are you using?
Where do you want to do this?
Why do you want to use this?
Why wouldn't you use the built in sorting feature that is in the searchlisting.tpl file?

-Mike

[chrisst1 +]

Sorry, I will remember for the future.

What version of the software are you using?
v4.0.9 Developer
What template are you using?
Default
Where do you want to do this?
showlistings.tpl
Why do you want to use this?
Because my existing site template does not have the room to show all sorting options in a row
Why wouldn't you use the built in sorting feature that is in the searchlisting.tpl file?
Can't find it, haven't got it.

Chris

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by chrisst1

Why do you want to use this?
Because my existing site template does not have the room to show all sorting options in a row
Why wouldn't you use the built in sorting feature that is in the searchlisting.tpl file?
Can't find it, haven't got it.

Chris

Im not sure I understand this. When you click on a category that allows ads, for example, you see a list of ads in a table. The head of the table has field names and the fields that show are are specified in the site admin.

You can click on the heading of a table to resort the table by that column. Is that not what you are talking about doing?

If its not, what do you mean by you dont have room to show all sorting options? In what manner do you hope to allow sorting?

[Eric Barnes +]

Maybe he means like I have done here:
ClassifiedMods Modifications

Sort Modifications By: Date Added Views Title Asc Desc

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

My personal opinion would be that it would be much more difficult to build a feature such as this then it would be to simply modify the showlisting.tpl file to your needs.

The built in sort functionality is used if you have the showlisting.tpl selected from the administration "Search Settings" / Search Results Template "default" (The short description is "showlistings2.tpl")

Something to also bear in mind is if you are logged in as an Admin when you view showlistings on the front end of the site (not in admin), you may have more fields visible then a guest or a registered user. You can check this by going to the usergroups within the administration. This is important based off your response of, "Because my existing site template does not have the room to show all sorting options in a row"

In addition, your response of "Can't find it, haven't got it." may mean that you are using the showlistings2.tpl (see above). If not, then simply clicking on any of the column headings will sort the listings accordingly. On my site, I added text that says, "Click on a column header to sort these listings" which helps instruct end users to that functionality.

As far as editing/modifying the template itself, if you are using the showlistings.tpl file (with the sorting capability), you could simply comment out the fields that you don't want to include to shorten your table width to fit properly within your template.

Example:

{if $sDisDateAdded == "Y"}
	<th scope="col"><a href="{$file}?{$querystring_dateadded}" class="sortheader">{$smarty.const.LANG_DATE_ADDED}</a> {if $sqlsort=="dateadded"}<img src="templates/{$smarty.const.MAIN_TEMPLATE}/images/sort{$oppositesort}.gif" border="0" alt="Sort" />{/if}</th>
{/if}

To this:

<!-- {if $sDisDateAdded == "Y"}
	<th scope="col"><a href="{$file}?{$querystring_dateadded}" class="sortheader">{$smarty.const.LANG_DATE_ADDED}</a> {if $sqlsort=="dateadded"}<img src="templates/{$smarty.const.MAIN_TEMPLATE}/images/sort{$oppositesort}.gif" border="0" alt="Sort" />{/if}</th>
{/if} -->

-Mike

[chrisst1 +]

Hi
From the start, I have installed the 68classifieds script into a subdirectory of our larger existing website therefore I have had to make many changes to the to 68classifieds template files so that the overall look is maintained. A result of these changes I am looking to replace (You can click on the heading of a table to resort the table by that column) with a simple dropdown instead of clickable links.

Chris

[seymourjames +]

Perhaps not the place to say this but here we go.

One thing people should be aware of is that whilst sorting provides a user experience it has some intrinsic problems associated with it as far as search engines.

Largely, duplicate content can result on urls which get picked up by search engines. It is a bit technical but sorting and pagination (moving between pages of lisitings) are non-commutative operations - this means in simple terms that the order in which you carry out the same operations matters.

The bottom line is that from a search engine perspective each page should have sufficiently unique different/content. Moreover, a search engine tends not to like completely different content every time it goes to the same url either. A small piece of content changing on a page is one thing but a whole page which is different each time gives the impression of instability. It has always been a problem of dynamic sites. To this end I have tested these principles on one of my sites. Internal pages get better indexing for sure when they are unique content from others and only changing a bit with the addition of one or two new adverts pushing in. For example, my new listings pages never do as well as a category page. Hierarchy wise the category page should do worse.

Interesting subject.

This why I always implement for my sites (because SEO is critically important to my site) that new listings cannot be sorted (always first in - first out of a page by date) and that all showlistings are only ever ordered by one variable whether it be price, date or whatever (in my case price).

[bowers01 +]

Originally Posted by Eric Barnes

Maybe he means like I have done here:
ClassifiedMods Modifications

Sort Modifications By: Date Added Views Title Asc Desc

Thats pretty good. Can you make it sort by price?
Also you cant see it in ie7.
Cheers

[seymourjames +]

Cant see what in I.E 7 what are you referring to?