Understanding the Filter Sidebar Widget

The Filter Sidebar Widget enables your customers to filter the categories of your shop in a more specific manner. The widget dynamically determines all possible specification attribute values, manufacturers and price ranges in the context of the current category and displays them in filter group order on the right side in the category details view. A count next to each filter item informs the customer how many products a filter item contains.

Price and Manufacturer are implicit attributes and are always displayed at the top of the filter widget. You don't need to specify attributes for these properties! The available criteria for Price can be edited in the Category Details screen > Category Info tab > Price ranges field.

Usage Scenario

Imagine you've got a product catalog where there are a lot of products within one category. In this case, your customers will have difficulties finding the products they are looking for when they are browsing through your categories. To make the search easier, they can filter the products more specifically by choosing a manufacturer, certain price ranges or other product specifications.

Enabling or Disabling the Filter Widget

Navigate to Configuration > Settings > Catalog settings
Switch to Product lists tab
Toggle the Display filter sidebar widget checkbox in the Navigation fieldset

Which Elements Can be Filtered?

The elements of the Filter Sidebar Widget your customers can use to filter for certain products more specifically will be created automatically from the following elements:

Manufacturers: The widget will identify the manufacturers of all products the category contains and will list them in the filter group Manufacturers.

Specification Attributes: The widget will identify the specification attributes of every product the category contains and will create a filter group for each of them as long as the Allow Filtering option of the attribute is active.

Price Ranges: The widget will provide filtering for prices if the category setting Price Ranges in the Info-Tab of the category configuration page contains a value. In this field, you can configure the price ranges to be shown in the filter for this category by entering values or ranges separated by semicolons (e.g. -25;25-50;50-;). For each of the defined values, a filter item will be created in the filter group Prices.

How Will It Be Used in the Frontend?

The settings that determine the display of the Filter Sidebar Widget in the frontend can be found in the Catalog Settings. Here, you can turn the widget on and off, as well as determine the number of filter items that will be displayed in each filter group and whether or not to show all items of a filter group. If you chose not to display all filter items at once, your customers can select the filter items they're interested in by clicking on Select Multiple of the corresponding filter group, which will open a dialog box displaying all of the filter items belonging to this filter group.