Masonry Grid – is only filtering what is shown

[cmwwebfx]

The masonry grid when using filters is only showing whatever number of posts we have first displayed. So if I have 20 posts showing, then it will only filter a category in those initial 20 posts. I would like to show at least 20 posts of the filtered category.

I know this was something that they managed to sort on Essential Grid plugin. Hoping you might find a way to do similar to display a filter of all our posts, but if we have set 20 posts to display at most, then it would show 20 filtered posts of that category without having to press the more button.

As we have over 900 news posts I don’t want to use the endless scroll on the site, so the more button suits us very nicely, just the filter needs some tweaking to display all our posts of the maximum number I want to initially display.

– Ciaran

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hi Ciaran,

Yeah, this is something that is a little tricky. Essential Grid loads in all the posts on page load, and then displays a set number, and the pagination just replaces the posts displayed. If you were to do this with 900 posts, it would take a very long time to load, and switching between hundreds of posts at once with transitions would cause terrible browser slowdown.

Only thing I can think of that would work for you in this situation would be to have the filters link to category pages?

– Ed

[cmwwebfx]

So it will be deep linking? this could be a workaround. What if we could have a way to make the page only load 100 posts and have the filter work on those rather than 900. would there be a possibility for that as a compromise?

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Well my thinking was that it would load the category view with either all posts for that category, or pagination.

You could easily load 100 posts into the main blog asset, without any changes needed, just not sure how feasible it really is to find a solution to easily browse 900 posts – I think that’s unrealistic for a filtering solution that doesn’t require page loads between categories, if I am honest.

– Ed

[cmwwebfx]

OK, I will let the digital team know of this as they wouldn’t have thought of the load time (and to be honest I didn’t think of that either).

However I would be keen to see a setting to load a certain number, but allow for only so many to display. That could be a good work around. I recon this is similar to how Essential has tackled it by setting how many to initially load, but set the visibility of the loaded. Maybe correct me if i am wrong on that.

I will give you a real world scenario of our agency business http://fuller.com.au
We had installed GO portfolio for our stories to show in a grid, we have 9 categories of news / work. I had initially set the display of 16 posts, and then we had the issue where the end user might have selected work as the filter, then only 3 posts were showing, and gave the impression that we have only done 3 work projects (where in actual fact we have done 30). So this caused concern with the team here at Fuller, so I started to investigate and found Essential. It allowed me to set the number of loaded vs the number of displayed. it was a good compromise as the load more was set to 16 so any that were not loading didn’t really matter as the load more gave the impression to discover more.

Hope that makes sense, if not I was just rambling on.

[Swift Ideas – Ed]

Hmm ok. Well I think we could probably add an extra field so that we have number of items, and number of items shown on load, that way when you use a filter, it will take into account all the items and show/hide where needed. This wouldn’t decrease the load time as all would still be loaded, however it would mean that you don’t have a very large block displayed. We have considered the AJAX route to load in as you filter, but we just don’t like the fact that it would affect the user experience, especially on slow connections.

That does make sense – thanks for the example.

– Ed