How It Works
Create and Manage Attributes:
The purpose of this Plugin is to give better searching capability to users for products, and this is accomplished with the help of custom product filters. Product filters include attribute sets which you can create manually or import from CSV. Here are both ways of achieving it;
- Create Attributes Manually
Login to admin panel and navigate to Catalog -> Attributes -> Manage Attributes. Create whatever product attributes you want users to search with, for example ‘year’, ‘make’, ‘model’. Once you are done navigate to Catalog -> Attributes -> Manage Attribute Sets. Create a new attribute set and add previously made attributes in this set and you are done here.
Create a CSV file containing all attributes that you require. You can import it from the Finder Manager in this Multi Search Magento Extension. We will talk about it in detail later;
Add Filters To New Products
Once you have created product attributes, Add new product and set appropriate attribute set from the drop down. Once the product is created you will find a new tab created for that product on the left column. You can enter its settings accordingly such as “2012” for year, “IBM” for Make etc.
Add Filters To Existing Products
To add attributes to existing products, you will need to use CSV in following format;
- Year Make Model SKU
- 2012 IBM IB-02 900-IBM
Once you will import this CSV, this attribute will automatically be inserted against respective SKU.
Finder Manager
Finder Manager allows you to create custom search filters based on previously made attributes for products. It can be placed on any CMS page.
Note: Before creating Finder Manager Filter you need to set attributes in the configuration. These attributes should either have been created manually (as described above) or through CSV import.
New filter will use attributes which are configured in the configuration section, so if you have added “year, model” in the configuration then Finder Manager filter will only use year and model attributes for product search. So before creating a filter, set configuration settings appropriately.
Once you have added attributes in the configuration, create new Finder Manager. It will automatically add attributes mentioned in the configuration. Finder Manager has 4 tabs as below;
In this section you can add filter name and set its layout such as vertical, horizontal etc.
These are the attributes which were added in the configuration section. You can only adjust numeric and alphabetical sorting from the drop down
From this tab you can import CSV containing all product attributes. CSV format should be as follow;
Attribute 1, Attribute 2,……., SKU
Make a heading row with title of attributes as mentioned above and then add accordingly.
This section will search Magento product catalog against attributes added in it (manual or CSV imported) and will lists all those products. It will return appropriate products when customers will search for any attribute.
Place Filter on CMS Page
To place Finder Manager Filter to any CMS page insert following code to that CMS page. You only need to insert right ID number for that filter. When you create a new filter there is a unique ID assigned to it, insert that and you are ready to go.
To insert it to CMS page, login to admin panel navigate to CMS -> Pages and select any desired page. Once that page is opened click on Content tab from the left column. On the right section add this code to any position you want.
{ {block type="yearmakemodel/yearmakemodel" name="yearmakemodel" id="2" template="yearmakemodel/yearmakemodel.phtml"} }
Configuration:
Configuration is fairly easy, important field to note is “Enter Attributes”. You will need to enter name of attributes here which will be used to create new product search filter.
If you are unclear about anything and require answer please feel free to contact our support team.