Plugin: Improve finding unanswered questions for certain tags, filter question lists

Question

There might be several ways to do this:

1. Add a tag filter dropdown to the "unanswered" question list.
Actually this could be also useful for many other pages like "all activities", "category pages", "most votes" etc.

Many times users are only interested in a very special tag and want to filter the lists by this tag.

2. Add a dropdown to the tag pages to filter for certain conditions:
- No answers
- More then x answers
- Answers with more than x votings
- Question or answers newer then one month
- Question or answers newer then one year
....

This filter dropdown could be also added to the normal question or catogery lists.

Which way would be easier to go? Would it be difficult to program a small plugin or extend a plugin like tag-search-pro? Anyone interested in developing such a plugin?

Answer 1

You usually can place the needed UI components on the currently existing pages without a core hack. The thing is asking the core NOT to use the query it is expecting to and use a different one. That will require a core hack. I will have to advice against it.

 

The thing is that you seem to be looking for an advanced search rather than a plugin to handle tags or unanswered questions. That will require more code but you'll be 100% in your control of it and you won't have to worry about breaking the core. The plugin type you might use for this is a page plugin. Maybe you could also use a search plugin. I haven't personally used the latter for searching but rather for indexing but I think it should do the trick too, if you are willing to parse user input from the search box (but I can't confirm it actually works that way!).