There are many scenarios in which you may wish to use a step-by-step styled preset, such as creating a product finder page, a need to redirect the user to a correct gender / brand / model / age page for further filtering, and so on. annasta Filters gives you a wide choice of options to satisfy most of the common demands.
The step by step filter style imposes limitations on certain options and functionality:
When combining your step-by-steps with other presets on the same page, please pay attention to those presets not using the filters that are present in the step-by-step. Active filters badges and other options will not function properly in a set up like this.
Please remember: the On Sale and Featured Products filters are not supported by the the step-by-step style, and will break the functioning of your products finder.
Another step-by-step presets limitation is the inability to use the “Reset other filters” setting with filters included in such presets.
Step by step style
In a step by step preset, each next filter appears after the previous is selected. Choose between displaying only the current filter at any given time, or adding each next filter to already selected.
Filters submission
Select the submission style for your product finder filters among the following 4 options:
- Update products list with each filter application: this may be a desired behavior on pages where you wish to apply filter results right away, but keep in mind that if your preset is programmed to redirect to the filtered results, this option will force the redirect with the very first filter’s selection!
- Update products list when the last filter is applied: this will submit (or redirect) the results only after one of the options of the last filter is selected
- Submit button displayed for all the steps: will have the “Filter” button displayed during all the steps, which will essentially allow the user to break out of the step-by-step at any moment.
- Submit button displayed after the last filter selection: will force the user to complete the step-by-step till the last filter by displaying the Filter button only after all the filters had been selected.
Next button
By default the transitions from one filter to the next happen automatically when at least one filter option gets selected. This may restrict the usage of multi-select filters in some step-by-step styles (one filter at a time displays, redirects). Use the Next button to enable the multi-selection in cases like that, or whenever you want to move from one filter to the next by a push of a button.
Back button
Display the Back button to enable moves to the previous steps of the products finder. This can be particularly useful in step-by-steps styled to show one filter at a time. Please, keep in mind that moving the steps back will sometimes reset the already selected further filters.
Redirect URL
Use this option when you wish to redirect the filtered results to a page, different from the page on which the preset is displayed.
Whenever your step-by-step preset is placed on a non-filterable page (not a shop / some products taxonomy archive / page with Woocommerce [products] shortcode registered for filtering), the filtered results will be automatically redirected to the shop page, so if that is the desired behavior, you can leave this field blank.
When your preset is displayed on a shop, products attribute taxonomy archive, or Woocommerce [products] shortcode page registered for filtering, the step by step will by default (with the Redirect URL field blank) filter the current page.
In a special case of redirecting the filtered result to a Woocommerce product taxonomy archive page (archive pages for product category / brand / tag with the links of type https://yoursite.com/product-category/fruit, https://yoursite.com/brand/somebrand etc), please add the archive-filter=1 parameter to the URL link, so that it would look something like https://yoursite.com/brand/somebrand/?archive-filter=1 (or https://yoursite.com/?brand=somebrand&archive-filter=1 when the permalinks aren’t enabled).