Review App feature spotlight: Sorting and filtering
May 28th, 2008Picture this: You’re planning a vacation to Hilton Head Island, SC and you want to go to dinner at this seafood place you ate at years ago but can’t remember the name - you think it starts with an ‘S’. Wouldn’t it be great to search a restaurant review website for restaurants at Hilton Head and sort by the first letter of the name so you could view the ‘S’ restaurants all at once? With Review App you can.
Review Apps are different from forums, blogs, and wikis because they organize important information and reviews hierarchically rather than by date or broad subject (though you can use Review App to organize items this way as well). Once you’ve created your data fields and loaded some data, just use the powerful back-end interface to set up the fields you’d like your users to be able to filter and sort.
In our restaurant example, we’ll want to include a field for the city where the restaurant is located and the name of the restaurant (among other things). Now we’ll choose the ‘Filter’ checkbox next to the city field and then choose ‘Ascending’ in the sort drop down menu for the name field. We’ll also allow users to sort by city as well.
That’s it. Now when users navigate to our ‘South Carolina restaurants’ category or section they’ll see a list of all the South Carolina restaurant listings. The filter list will be automatically generated based on the cities saved in our restaurant listings and the column headings will become links that, when clicked, will re-sort the listings based on the column data. Keeping with our example, we’d click ‘Hilton Head’ in the city filter list, then click the restaurant name column heading to sort alphabetically. Scroll down to the restaurants starting with the letter ‘S’ and we found it - the Sea Shack!
Sorting and filtering capabilities are native in Review App meaning you’ll spend less time coding and more time building your review site! See sorts and filters in action at BBQRestaurantReviews.com!
