Multifield/Location Filter

When you have thousands of ads on your website, you need to make sure that users will be able to find the right one quickly without wasting their time looking through irrelevant listings. The multifield/location filter is designed to streamline a user’s search by narrowing it down to most relevant ads.

How it works

The multifield/location plugin consists of two massive modules: the multifield filter that allows you to create various dropdown fields allowing users to filter through ads and land on exactly those matching their preferences. The location filter in its turn allows a user to filter through ads based on their location and narrow down their search to a particular location of the ad.

Another great feature that the Plugin may boast of is the ability to show ads in nearby locations within a specific radius. The Plugin allows you to display listings not only from the city selected by a user but also from the suburbs of the selected city and nearby areas and cities. The feature is especially useful for recently launched classified sites that cannot offer a wide selection of listings in all the locations.

Since the plugin consists of two modules, they will be described separately so that you could understand better how each of them works.

Multi-Field

The multifield module allows you to create an unlimited number of cascading dropdown fields that you may use on "Post an Ad", "Registration" pages and "Search" forms. The fields you create with the multifield plugin are interdependent meaning that every subsequent field represents a subcategory (or several subcategories) of a category selected from the previous fields.

To give you an example, let us say a user of a real-estate portal wishes to add a new property on a "Post an Ad" page. The dropdown list shows him a list of available properties to be added, such as an apartment, a cottage, a detached house, vacation homes and others. Those will be Level 1 field.

When a user selects a vacation house, he will see further options relating exclusively to vacation properties, represented by Level 2 field, such as beach, resort or an island house, cabins, condos and more.

By choosing, let’s say, a beach house, a user will see further subcategories represented by Level 3 fields, such as stilt, pier or a platform beach house.

The number of options and fields is unlimited and you can create as many of the subcategories as you want. This works similarly for other classifieds sites, for instance for auto allowing users to filter through brands, makes, models, versions, body types etc.

Location Filter

The Location Filter equips your site with a GEO filtering tool allowing you to create a set of interdependent location fields, which help users filter the listings based on a particular location.

When users select a certain country, they are presented with regions and cities relevant to the chosen country. For instance, if your site already allows a user to sort listings by country, you may further fine-tune the filtering by adding Field 2 – that will represent regions in a country, field 3 that will represent cities within a region, and even field 4 that will narrow down the options to districts, neighborhoods or metro stations within a city.

Back End

Considering the complexity of the Plugin, the manager in the Admin Panel offers you a multitude of configuration options. You can add multifields to the "Post an ad", "Registration" pages or search forms.

You may further specify on which pages of your website you want to use geo-filtering, you may also add the selected location to the page URL, for instance:

www.domain.com/united-states/california/san-francisco/properties.html

You may also add the first location level to a subdomain, and your ad will look like this:

united-states.domain.com/california/san-francisco/properties.html

The last option for the admin allows adding the location of the ad to the listing URL. With this option, the ad will have a location of a specific listing, and not the location selected by a user. For instance:

united-states.domain.com/california/san-francisco/properties/condo-in-arguello-blvd.html

As you can see, this adds value to your website SEO and allows the search engines to better index your ads. Furthermore, there are three options for the URL where "mixed" is a default one.

• Mixed: united-states.domain.com/california/san-francisco/properties.html
• Combined: united-states-california-san-francisco.domain.com/properties.html
• Unique: san-francisco.domain.com/properties.html

SEO Meta Data

The administrator may also apply a location variable to page Meta data, for instance a country:

united-states.domain.com/california/san-francisco/properties.html

In page settings, we may add location variables to the "Title" field. In the example below, you will see that we use programming elements, such as {if}:

Vehicles and Motorbikes for sale, auto spares and accessories {if location} in {if location_level3}{location_level3}, {/if}{location_level1}{/if}
In the front end, the title will look as follows:

Vehicles and Motorbikes for sale, auto spares and accessories in San Francisco, United States

This condition prevents from showing the variables and an “in” word if the location is not applied to a country.

As you can see, the plugin is versatile and offers an administrator a multitude of various options. The best way to understand how the plugin works is to start using it and creating your own fields in the admin panel. The multifield/location plugin is a must-have for classifieds sites of all types.