Search by make model year

[T.A. Garrison, LLC]

There seems to be a lot of questions about how to use VM with an extended search capability of "Make", "Model", "Year". And of course those titles could be changed for other categories for businesses other than auto sites, but the same functionality. The fact that quite a few people have asked for this over the years, and now "I" have a customer who needs this functionality, I'd like to have the VM team take this into serious consideration.

My question is, since I've not been able to find an answer to the question about "if" VM can perform such a search, what would it take to get the VM team to create such an extension? It could be an add-on that's in the VM "Extensions", or however it's provided, but I would like to know if there is someone, or the VM team, willing to create this A.S.A.P.

Tell me what it would take - time and costs.

[GJC Web Design]

It depends a lot on how you set up your categories

As I have d0ne here:  https://www.4wdpartshop.com.au/ each Make, Model and Year is a category hierarchy

Parts of course can be in multiple cats

Then I built a "drill down" search  module that returns each subsequent cat group

Once u get there then I have the parts sub groups and an ajax search just in the selected category

[balai]

You better use custom fields for achieving that.
Dependent Custom Fields For All were developed exactly for solving that kind of problem. I.e. declaring dependencies between custom fields like the "Make > Year > Model".

You can then use Custom Filters for filtering your products based on those custom fields.

[T.A. Garrison, LLC]

bali - Thank you for that. It seemed to me there should be a way to do that within VM and you suggested something I had considered but didn't want to go down a rabbit hole.
Thanks.

[pinochico]

It seemed to me there should be a way to do that within VM

Surely there is a way to use this within the core VM: developped it (how surprising).
It's open source, so you're free and you can make it.
You're forgetting the basic mindset of the VM - the core of Ecommerce is in Core, the rest of the needs of the various clients can be solved by 3dparty extensions (as breakdesign proves by the way).

We now use the Search Ready online service (for example here: www.karcher-satter.cz).
It's faster, more accurate, uses Elastic Search, synonyms and in the settings I can specify what appears in the results for the end customer - he has full control over the output