Catalog Search

Learn how to organize your Apiboost product catalog with categories and filters.

Product Categories

The product catalog is organized by terms in the product categories vocabulary (with very few exceptions). When adding a new product node to the site, you’ll be able to categorize it.

Installation should create the vocabulary with some default terms in a parent/child sequence. There’s a functional reason for ordering terms this way. First we need to look at the product catalog landing page. Head over to /catalog and note how each card has a title, with a number of links in the card itself.

This is done using parent/child items in taxonomy. The parent item is the title of the card, while each nested child item is a link within it.

It’s recommended that there be no more than 3 or 4 rows (roughly 9-12 cards) with no more than 10 links per card, or a maximum of 10 child terms per parent.

Product Filters

The main difference between categories and filters is there’s no limit as to how many filters you can attribute to a product. They’re a secondary level of search criteria. Apiboost supports up to four filters, which you may use all four, less, or not at all.

✨ Recommended usage of product filters:

1. Small catalogs:

2. Large catalogs:

Administering Filters:

• In taxonomy, you’ll have vocabularies for all four filters, regardless of being enabled

• If you want to change the filter titles in the catalog search, rename the vocabulary

• For any filters you don’t want to use, or if you don’t want to use them at all, ignore these vocabularies and disable them in catalog settings.

Disable any filters not in use! Never delete them as it may cause issues in Apiboost.

Best Practices for Product Organization

While there’s no standard amount of API products, there’s a need to keep the product catalog as accessible and user-friendly as possible. Product organization should always be taken into consideration regardless of how many products are offered.

As volume increases, so does the need to organize. Organization can simply be using categories and filters in ways that they’re most effective.

Sometimes it helps to visualize categories and filters as a matrix. For example:

Categories are best left to independent variables, a primary way of making a distinction between groups of products that may have nothing to do with one another. They could be entirely separate products used in conjunction with one another with no other connection besides that.

Filters are excellent macro-level search criteria for connecting otherwise independent categories. In the example above, Inventory and Shipping Services may have nothing to do with one another, but they may both be region-based. Having that in common makes region and language excellent candidates for filters.

Your best practices will always depend on the needs and structure of your organization.