In this episode:
Discussion – What’s the lifetime value of a client? – [4:06]
WP Builds is brought to you by...
and
Interview – FacetWP filtering for your site with Matt Gibbs – [18:23]
Ending Fact – Duck, petal, love – [52:58]
*** COUPON CODE – get 10% off Facet WP by using the offer code “save10”
Right, so we know that WordPress is pretty cool don’t we? Glad that we got that straight. It does heaps of things really, really well, but honestly, it’s got limitations! That’s why we have plugins, to make WordPress better and to make it do things that the core developers don’t want to worry about.
A few years ago I needed to build a site for an estate agent (realtor for you folk over in North America I think). This site needed the ability to show a list of properties on the market, but the client wanted the users of the site to be able to filter the list of properties so that only the ones that matched their criteria were shown to them. So… houses under £300k, with a garage and more than 3 bedrooms. You get the idea.
Well, trying to pull that off in WordPress is jolly hard, but thankfully Matt Gibbs got there before you! He’s created a plugin called Facet WP which is the answer to all your filtering prayers (you do have filtering prayers don’t you)! It’s properly cool.
I’ve used the plugin with ACF to create a ‘property’ Custom Post Type with property related fields which I then linked up to Facet WP so that they could be filtered.
You’ve got a whole load of options of how you would like to filter. You can drag a slider or check a box or use a dropdown or auto-select or date range or proximity or or or… all the things that you’ve seen when browsing sites like Amazon. The plugin also works with Beaver Builder so that you can place the filters and filterable content in a really easy to use drag-and-drop interface. Awesome and powerful!
I cannot really express just how great this plugin is. I suggest that you head over to the website and have a play with the demos which you’ll find in the main navigation at the top of the page. You’ll see what I mean.
It’s really fast to set up the filters and in my case I think that I had a working system up and running in a few hours. I think that you’re most likely cleverer than I am, so you ought to be even quicker!
Matt talks about what made him decide to create the plugin, how it’s changed over time and what he has in mind for the future of the plugin. He also drops a little bomb about a plugin called Pods, that I did not know!
Matt’s such a nice chap that he decided that you folk ought to be able to get get 10% off Facet WP, and to that effect he has a coupon code for you. Use the code “save10” at the checkout and you should see 10% disappear so that you can buy more ice-cream!
Great interview about a cool plugin!
