Is there a back office way to arrange the layout of search results pages?

[Angstony_2]

I'm using the default theme but I really don't like having the search results being pushed to the bottom of the page, underneath many rows of new items and previously viewed items. I think its useful to have those two lists displayed on the page, but if a user has gone to the trouble of searching, the priority should surely be what they are looking for, not what we hope they will look at and items they've already seen.

So is there a way in the back office to arrange it this way? Because if there is, I'm struggling to find it.

[dosbiner]

Can you provide keyword example and maybe screenshot?

[Angstony_2]

@dosbiner Sorry, I probably didn't explain it very well. You can see what I mean if you go to the community theme demo – preferably using a mobile, but failing that, narrow your browser window till it becomes a single column. Click on a few items then search for something – 'coffee' say – and you will see all of the hooked left column lists are place above the search results. Even though there are no 'new' products in the TB demo, the actual search results still end up half way down the page. On our site it's over three quarters of the way down an even longer page. It's frankly ridiculous!

[AndyC]

You can turn it off and use the other search bar which appears next to Coffee & Tea /tea ... It doesn't have a drop down list though Or you can disable it small screens Or you can disable the drop down list by changing it in "Preferences Search " to instant where instead of a dropdown it searches by product ie the products show below .. I think ,or play around with the 4 switches to get your desired result

[Angstony_2]

@andyc @AndyC I don't think you're quite understanding the problem. It's not the search box itself, but the results page that comes up after searching. AFAIK that's the same regardless of search box settings.

To illustrate what I mean here's the full TB theme page with the search results section highlighted in red:

And here's our site's:

If anyone thinks that isn't so bad, I can tell you on my modestly sized mobile phone I have to scroll down through 6 to 7 pages before getting to the search results. Luckily, we don't want any of the other things hooked to the left column, otherwise it would be a considerably longer page and I imagine users would give up in exasperation before getting to the content they were actually looking for.

[AndyC]

Oh OK I think I get what you want now You may find you would need to go into ftp / your template and find the code and move it above everything else. That unfortunately I'm not very good at

[Angstony_2]

That unfortunately I’m not very good at

No, me neither. Hence why I asked for a back office solution. Delving into code pages without knowing what you're doing is daunting and almost certainly unwise. This is my first experience with any eCommerce software and even though I consider myself reasonably IT-literate, I'm finding the level of technical abilities required for working with this product quite a challenge.

[dosbiner]

ok now I know what you mean. for me, I just disable mobile view from all left column modules, so it just show on desktop and tablet view. or do you want to move it to the bottom?

[Angstony_2]

@dosbiner Yes, I like having those lists on search pages, but I want them underneath the search results not above them. I'm really surprised this isn't how it is by default, as it seems like the obvious logical arrangement to me.

Is it possible to disable modules from just the left column on mobiles? Only 'New products' is our home page's default list and we like it that way, so it has to be enabled generally on all devices.

[Angstony_2]

Aaaaannd… something I've done in my numerous attempts to solve this problem has screwed up the hooks and I can't figure out how to fix it! Now even on wider devices its showing the left column full width and above the results instead of… well… in a left column. Anyone know how to fix this without resorting to the drastic measure of a full restore, please?

[dosbiner]

@angstony_2 you can see default setting here https://back.thirtybees.com/administrator/ hmm, move to bottom for mobile view only is not simple solution, maybe someone have another solution about this

[datakick]

You can 1. Disable left column on search page entirely -- go to Preferences > Themes, click on Advanced settings, and uncheck Left column for Search controller. 2. Alternatively, you can invert order of columns using css. One way to do that is this css rule (add it to your global.css file). Note that it will be applied on search page only.

css @media (max-width: 768px) { body#search #columns>.row { display: flex; flex-direction: column-reverse; } }

[Angstony_2]

@dosbiner Thanks for that link to the default settings it's useful to know, although I still can't work out what I've done to screw up our search page layout.

@datakick The second option has certainly improved the situation a lot, so many thanks for that. However, it's not entirely satisfactory because the items below the search results are now in an illogical order. I'd really like the order to be exactly as it was except with the search results at the top. I've also had to take the column reversing code block out of the media query for now, because of the problem I've got with the left column now spanning the entire page regardless of screen size. Any ideas what could have caused that?

[datakick]

@Angstony_2 I have no idea, the snippet works just fine on my server, and it does not change search results in any way. I'm using community theme -- what theme do you have? You can try it on my demo server

[Angstony_2]

@datakick Sorry, I've probably explained things badly again. The search results section is fine and thanks to your snippet it's now displaying at the top, which is the most important factor for me. But the other sections – New products, recently viewed items, infos, categories, etc, – are also now in reverse order. In other words it's gone from the illogical BCDEA to the better AEDCB, but it should really be ABCDE.

[Angstony_2]

Never mind, I'm an idiot! I can change the order of the other items in the Modules|Positions settings. I still think there should be a more user friendly way of doing stuff like this without having to resort to editing files.

Edit: clarification.