This project involved developing a custom product filter for a WooCommerce store that sells kitchen worktops. Off-the-shelf options — including those bundled with the theme and third-party plugins — proved unreliable and overly complex, offering too many settings and failing to behave as expected on the front end.
The requirement was simple on the surface: allow customers to filter by colour within specific product categories. But the solution had to be lightweight, intuitive, and robust — avoiding the pitfalls of the existing tools.
The filter I built:
- Automatically populates based on colour attributes assigned to visible products
- Only appears when colour filters are relevant (i.e. at least one product has a colour set)
- Can be injected programmatically or displayed with a simple shortcode
- Degrades gracefully with no impact on other site sections
Deployment was complicated slightly by server restrictions that prevented uploading via the file manager, but FTP access was provided and setup completed manually. A separate theme issue — involving jQuery UI being loaded without its CSS — caused broken styling, which was resolved by conditionally including the missing stylesheet on archive pages.
Post-launch, a couple of small tweaks were made, including fixing file paths after a directory restructure and adding logic to exclude certain product categories from the filter temporarily.
The end result was a simple, elegant solution that enhanced product discoverability without introducing plugin bloat or frontend clutter — built specifically to fit the real-world needs of the store.