Digital Butter

Jonathan Atkins of Dell on faceted classification

Props to Dell for recognizing what a great platform MODx is.

We can see parallels with a site we built a while back - navigation on the restaurants page is somewhat similar to the attribute based navigation Dell is using, in our case TV values are being used for navigation to choose restaurants by cuisine, ratings, locations etc. (see the restaurant selector in the left column of WOMguide.com)

The way we built the backend looks pretty similar to how Dell have done it, without all the manager manager customisations. We’ll write up later on about how that live updating restaurant selector is able to give search results previews in real time without crashing the server =) Our solution is actually to use a free Java based fulltext search engine called DBSight.

Also has some other cool features - Try searching for ‘chiken’ in the the quick search, and you’ll be prompted ‘did you mean chicken’. All of this comes dynamically from TV field values found in the database.