Faceted Navigation?

Has anyone created, or attempted to create, a faceted navigation system for MODx? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_navigation

There are some ecommerce engines like Magento that are working on this, but I have yet to see it in a multi-purpose CMS. Faceted nav is an excellent method of browsing large content collections and quickly narrowing in on specific items.

Thanks,

Jonathan

This could be done with Ditto to some extent, using tags.

Looks like there’s an Apache foundation project called Solr ( http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ ) for implementing faceted navigation and search. Unfortunately that’s beyond my basic development skills. I think this would be a great project for someone in the community to take on. Integration between MODx and Solr would give MODx a capability that no other general purpose CMS has.

Quote from: Nihil at Feb 23, 2008, 12:16 PM

Looks like there’s an Apache foundation project called Solr ( http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ ) for implementing faceted navigation and search. Unfortunately that’s beyond my basic development skills. I think this would be a great project for someone in the community to take on. Integration between MODx and Solr would give MODx a capability that no other general purpose CMS has.

FYI, I’ve actually done a partial integration with Solr using some of the new facilities in 0.9.7; it still needs some work, and I will likely turn this into an official MODx Add-on project once we have the new core release available, so others can contribute to the effort. But more importantly I think, this integration work has revealed some ways that we can approach the problem with simple native solutions, without having to utilize J2EE applications like Lucene/Solr to do it. More on this soon in regards to all kinds of search and navigation topics.