I'm trying to create a products page in SS which incorporates a live filter. Ideally I need a combination of the following 2 sites, both checkboxes and text:

http://unspace.ca/livefilter
and
http://www.digitalinferno.net/live-filter/

Can anyone point me in the right direction as to best practice to set this up in SS? It would need the following features:

1) User can update and add products from the CMS backend (the products would be held as records in the DB - so not as content areas)
2) Products would show and hide depending on the categories selected in real-time
3) A tab in the CMS of user defined "tags" so that a text search box can also be implemented with multiple custom tags.

It's a big ask, but I think it would be beneficial to the SS community as a whole to get live filtering happening! The next step will be to implement something like http://sikbox.com/ for a live site wide search!

Thanks!

Um, looks like you're talking about a few separate things here.

There's the "Live Filter" UI pattern that Pete Forde named, as discussed here http://ui-patterns.com/pattern/LiveFilter anyway. I don't know about implentations of this. Would need AJAX or something, of course.

As to what sikbox is doing, it looks like what they're calling "live search" is autocompleting a text box, specifically, here, where you're entering a search term. Which as far as I can see right now is called "autosuggestion". Based on their own database they've built from crawling the site you're trying to search. Whereas you're talking about a database you're building youself. Well, Googling for terms (search ajax autocomplete) give some useful stuff.

As to implementing this autocompletion functionality in SilverStripe, well, I imagine you'd need some AJAX library and some wizardry. That Google search above turned up this page, which lists a bunch of reusable scripts:

http://webtecker.com/2008/03/10/10-auto-complete-ajax-scripts/

You'd need to write the code for the server bit in the SS site, of course. There's bits of SS that can help there, I think.

And as far as your products database, you can implement that in SilverStripe using the new ModelAdmin module, I would have thought. And as part of that, include a field just for keywords, that would be used for the autocompletion.

Good luck. Hope this somewhat vague post was useful.

did you ever get anywhere with this Hat-Rack?
Just about to try something similar so keen to hear of other experiences.

Not yet, I've been focusing on other things so this has gone on the back burner for a while.