NederlandsYou can use the content search feature to let your customers search through all content in your shop. There are two variations:
Tagged content search
This variation adds the content to your current feed as 'items'. It then uses tags as properties. You may create a separate category for content under which you place all content items, for example:
All content items will have been given tags or other properties you may want to use in the search feature.
Now, content can be offered in the search results. Results are often shown separately from the product results, for example by adding an extra tab. See the example below, where recipes and information are shown in a different tab than the product results. Your customers can then decide if they want to view products or content.
Content items can even be shown in autocomplete, as you can see in this example:
Technical explanation
1. Feed
Content search uses the same specifications as the product feed. This means that a few required fields are still mandatory. For content items, you may fill in 0 for any irrelevant fields. You can fill in the item title as the product name and determine which attributes to use for each content item. This could be tags, URL etc.
2. Implementation
To implement this variation of content search, you need to do the request twice, where you search through products once and then search through just the content next. You can do this by adding the categoryID to the request, or by filtering on itemtype=content, in case you add an 'itemtype' attribute with product or content as a value.
Of course, you can still do one request, but you will see products and content mixed together in the results, and that is less user-friendly.
Content search combined with Personal Merchandising
This variation lets you show one or multiple content items mixed in with the product search results. This doesn't require an extra tab. It may look like this:
This can be set up with the Personal Merchandising module, where content is available as a component:
This way, you'll ensure that the third position is always filled with a relevant content item. The item is still adjusted to the search result. So if a content item is found for a certain search query, then it will be shown in that position. If there is no matching content item, the spot will be filled by a normal product.
Technical explanation
1. Feed
This variation also requires you to add the content items to the feed, and you need to use the same specifications as for a product feed. This means that a few required fields are still mandatory. For content items, you may fill in 0 for any irrelevant fields. You can fill in the item title as the product name and determine which attributes to use for each content item. This could be tags, URL etc.
This variation needs an extra added attribute that allows it to determine what is a product and what is a content item. You can do this by adding an itemtype attribute with content and product as values.
2. Implementation
This variation does not need any extra implementation. The content item is sent with the regular product sorting.