Investigate ability to search Shopify products

[aiwilliams]

An important feature that has been requested is better searching. We need to understand what Shopify allows for searching. It may be that we must create a custom search application.

• [ ] List public properties that can searched
• [ ] List meta data that can be added, if any
• [ ] List meta data that can be searched, if any

[isaacjwilliams]

Ugh. It appears that any amount of metadata can be added to products, but that metadata cannot be searched.

Shopify automatically searches product titles, handles, bodies (descriptions), vendors, product types, tags, variants, and SKUs. Out of those, our best bet is probably tags. Products can have an arbitrary number of arbitrarily named tags (E.G. "genesis", "theology", etc).

[aiwilliams]

@fomentia, could you please go to the card in Trello, the one that represents the searching feature, and see if it says much about what we need to support? If it does not, ping Scott there and ask him if he could provide some guidance about what they must have. We can certainly start with tags!

[isaacjwilliams]

@aiwilliams Mr. Wylie did provide search criteria!

The TL;DR seems to be that user should be able to search by main scripture text, sermon title, season (E.G. Christmas, Easter, etc), and time (his example is "the 10 most recent broadcasts, sorted by date"). The main sermon text (Genesis 1:1-3, for example) could easily be added as a tag. Titles will be automatically searched by Shopify, so that's a non-issue. Season, too, begs to express itself as a tag. I don't know about time, but I assume that Shopify allows users to view recently added products... More on that to come! :grin:

[isaacjwilliams]

Shopify allows customers to view products sorted from new to old (or old to new, if they so desire). However, I don't see any way to select a time range, such as January 2017 through March 2017. I don't think that much functionality is needed though; Mr. Wylie's exact words were "Recent Broadcasts".

[aiwilliams]

Thanks for this info @fomentia. Let's see how far we can get with the mechanisms already there in Shopify.

I do think the date-based searching is going to be a problem if Shopify doesn't provide any way to create date-type tags and tag-specific/focused advanced searching.

Also, by "tag", do you mean "meta field", the feature of Shopify mentioned in a previous comment?

[isaacjwilliams]

By "tag" I mean tag.

[aiwilliams]

By "tag" I mean tag.

Ah, I see. Another aspect of search is the SEO meta fields that can be associated with the Product.

I think the next step here is to prove out the ability to find a Sermon Series by creating a few Products with information from the current production data.

1) Scripture Text. (Only the main text of the sermon. For example, searching for Genesis 1:1 would return the Genesis series but would NOT return other times that Stephen mentioned Genesis 1:1 in a different series.)

• [ ] Obtain a sampling of sermons and identify the "main text of the sermon" - the source of something like "Genesis 1:1" - documenting the property (title?, description?) or tag or meta field that would be best for this information

2) Sermon Title.

The challenge here is, it seems like the Sermon Series is the Product that can be purchased and each of the Sermons is really just a detail of the Sermon Series. This means that the title of a Sermon is really just a part of the description of a Product. This leads me to believe there needs to be some research into whether this Sermon-Series-is-the-Product approach is really the right thing to do.

• [ ] Validate the assumption that Products will be Sermon Series and Sermons are details of a Product
• [ ] Document the property (title?, description?) or tag or meta field that would be best for Sermon title searching

3) Season. (Christmas, Easter, etc.)

• [ ] Obtain a sampling of sermons and identify the "Season" - the source of something like "Christmas" - documenting the property (title?, description?) or tag or meta field that would be best for this information

4) Recent Broadcasts. (Listeners could quickly find the 10 most recent broadcasts, sorted by date.

This seems like it could be a manually maintained Collection in Shopify and listed on a Page or in the Featured Products or something like that, but it isn't really a search concern. A different Issue will track this concern.

Once some sample series/sermons have been obtained and recorded (so that we can re-use the output of the effort)...

• [ ] Create sample Product data with necessary tags and meta fields
• [ ] Test searching to ensure it works as desired

[aiwilliams]

Regarding searching by season, a release statement such as "Originally preached on September – November 1988" covers Thanksgiving and Halloween. We need more information on how the season is determined, whether it can be discovered from data on the current resources or not.

[aiwilliams]

Recent broadcasts is not a simple listing of Series or Sermons. A Broadcast is something like a Sermon, and a series of Broadcasts over a date range is something like a Series. The Broadcasts are Sermons or partial Sermons with the radio introduction, and the associated Sermon can be purchased, but they are not one and the same. Searching should not include these Broadcasts (the Broadcast is not a Product).