Custom Fields Question

Great, thanks Guust.

Ideally, I think it would be great not to have to create a separate field for the special offers…seems like it should be a boolean search to begin with…”who has specials” kind of thing.

Beyond that though, it would really make the custom fields, listing, and search functions more powerful if there was an option on the custom fields with this in mind…appear if true, nothing if false.

cheers

Stiofan,

While a widget might have uses, I think what I’m talking about is broader, more universal in scope. That wouldn’t really help with filtering search results.

Currently, with the “Special Offers” field that is setup, it gives businesses a chance to list any offers or deals they have…great feature and extra value.

That can be turned on for searching and sorting, which should be great value to the end user. I think the issue is that the end user wants to see “all listings that have special offers,” rather than “let me think of an offer to search for and hope there is a match.” But do I search for “buy one, get one free” or “BOGO” or “2 for 1”?

It’s really less about search and more about filtering on all listings, or all listings that match a search, that also meet a criteria, in this case, has special offers.

I think the special offers is a perfect example, but the idea of a true/false, empty/not empty boolean kind of functionality could be applied in other cases as well.

Conceptually, what I’m thinking is that for any custom field in the advanced search you have a toggle “search on field value or boolean (checked/not empty)”.

I realize there’s more to it than that which is why I just tried to create a checkbox field to go along with the special offers text field. It’s a little clunky as the lister needs to remain to check or uncheck as they add or remove offers. I thought it would work at least until I saw that after it had been checked and then later unchecked, a line now appeared on the listing page entry showing it as “Special Offers:No”. That’s gonna get real cluttered looking after awhile. The ideal there would be for a message or flag to appear only if the condition is true, “Has Specials”, but nothing appears when false.

Does that all make sense?

This kind of functionality would add a lot of capabilities to really highlight listings and call out and special or relevant details on listings.

cheers

Thanks. I know there is a lot of complexity here based on some of my ideas, but if you can figure it out, even part way, I think this could be extremely powerful.

cheers

@purpleedge

Interesting way to look at it. I agree to some extent. Ideally I agree some kind of an “internal” promotion manager with set dates and other features would be ideal, especially if it could be offered in a package as well…free appears on your site, tier 1 appears within your category, tier 2 appears on up to 2 related categories of your choice, tier 3 appears sitewide via a widget, kind of thing.

In my case, I’m going to try to encourage listers to take a more proactive approach here, testing and changing offers, etc….but your scenario is certainly not unlikely at least in some cases as well.

cheers