Download the PHP package venveo/craft-characteristic without Composer

Characteristic plugin for Craft CMS

Characteristic provides a new way of storing and querying complex descriptive relationships and attributes for elements.

You can think of it as an "attribute-value" system, where an attribute may be applied to an element (think "Tags") and a specific value may applied to that attribute (Think, a Super Table fields with a tag or category and a text field)

For example, consider you have a list of local restaurants and you want to build a system to help visitors pick a restaurant with their requirements. You could create a series of tags or categories, such:

• "Has outdoor seating"
• "Serves pizza"
• "Cash only"

However, this data is completely unaware of context and is really just a cloud of ideas. Further, what if we wanted to introduce price points, such as "$", "$$", "$$$", "$$$$", "$$$$$"

Do we now create a new category group or do we just toss it in with the others? If we create a new group, we have to now write more code.

Characteristic solves this by creating two new element types, sorted into groups. The "Characteristic" element can be applied like a tag, once applied, a "Characteristic Value" can be applied. This value is free-form and new elements will be created as new distinct values are created PER-CHARACTERISTIC.

For example, as a developer, I would create a Characteristic Group called "Restaurant Finder Attributes" and within it, the content editors can define their characteristics like any other element:

• "Accepts Cash"
• "Price Level"
• "Seating Outdoors"
• "Which dish looks most delicious?"
• "How many vodka-tonics before I get banned?"

Through the use of a custom field, I can now apply these characteristics as needed with values, as needed. Notice the last option above: it asks to pick a photo that I like. This works because both characteristics and characteristic values can supply their own field layouts per group!

Characteristic provides a helper with a Twig variable called "Drilldown"

The drilldown tool allows you to provide an element query, such as: craft.entries.section('restaurants')

and receive access to the most relevant characteristic and its options. The helper also manages a "state" based on selected options, allowing you to quickly create a "Quiz" to find the most suitable element.

Requirements

This plugin requires Craft CMS 3.4.0 or later.

Using Characteristic

The Drilldown Helper

The characteristics field

The field returns a CharacteristicLinkBlockQuery pre-configured for the element.

Get all characteristics on an entry and show them as a table

Querying for elements

There are a few different ways to query for elements with certain characteristics.

You could use the native Craft relationships, for example:

Terminology & Concepts

Characteristic Group

Contains a collection of Characteristics, its Values, and Links. Allows you maintain a separation of Characteristics that are unrelated. For example: 'Product Characteristics', 'Restaurant Characteristics'

Characteristic

An Element that represents the descriptive attribute to assign to another element. For example: "Material", "Flow Rate", "Open on Sundays". A Characteristic may have custom fields.

Characteristic Value

An Element that represents a potential value for a Characteristic. Each Characteristic Value is relative to a specific Characteristic. A Characteristic Value has a value attribute that is a text string that is unique to each Characteristic. For example: "Yes", "No", "1.25".

Characteristic Link Block

An Element that contains the linkage between a particular Characteristic, a number of Characteristic Values, the field it was created from, as well as the element its attached to.

Characteristic Field

A custom field that allows you to create Characteristic Links. It may be used on any element that supports field layouts (Entries, Products, Categories, etc.). When used in templating, it returns a Query object for Characteristic Links that is configured for the soruce element and field.