Rotozoom Product Filter — User Manual

Lightning-fast AJAX product filtering for WooCommerce. Product Filter lets your shoppers narrow your catalogue by category, price, attributes, stock and rating — with results updating instantly, without reloading the page.

• Free version: full AJAX filtering on every product attribute (no cap), price slider, stock/on-sale/new/rating filters, category context, and works with classic, block and XStore themes.
• Pro version: match all selected values of an attribute (AND logic), your own products-per-page choices, an exact colour for each swatch value, and a results cache for faster repeat filtering. Pro needs the edition downloaded from rotozoom.com, which installs Rotozoom Connect automatically — you sign in there with your Rotozoom account.
• Pro price: €47 / year per site, incl. VAT.

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For newcomers: what this plugin does

When a shop has more than a handful of products, customers need a way to find what they want quickly. A filter is the panel — usually on the left of the shop page — with checkboxes and sliders like Price, Colour or Brand. As the shopper ticks boxes, the product grid narrows down.

Product Filter adds this panel to your store and makes it instant: the grid updates the moment a box is ticked, with no page reload. It also keeps the chosen filters in the web address (the URL), so a shopper can bookmark or share a filtered view.

Setup

1. Prepare your data

Filters are only as good as your product data, so first make sure your products have:

• Categories assigned (under each product, or Products → Categories).
• Attributes such as Colour, Size, Wattage, Socket (set up under Products → Attributes, then assigned to products).

Tip: keep attribute slugs in plain ASCII letters (for example socket, wattage). Non-Latin slugs can be mis-encoded in the URL.

2. Place the filter

The filter appears automatically on your shop, category, tag and search pages. To place it elsewhere — on any page or post — use the [rotozoom_filter] shortcode (options: category, per_page, columns, orderby, sidebar="0", bar="0"); [rotozoom_filter_bar] renders the sort/per-page toolbar on its own. The filter automatically respects the page it sits on — on a category page it filters within that category.

3. Choose which filters to show

In the plugin settings (Rotozoom → Product Filter) you pick which controls appear — categories, price range, individual attributes, stock status and rating — and the order they appear in.

Feature reference

AJAX filtering with URL sync

Every change to a filter triggers an AJAX request — a background call to the server that returns only the matching products and swaps them into the grid, with no full page reload. The active filters are written into the URL, so:

• The browser Back button works as expected.
• A filtered view can be bookmarked or shared.
• Landing on a filtered URL directly shows the correct, pre-filtered results.

Price range slider

A draggable two-handle slider lets shoppers set a minimum and maximum price. The range spans the prices of the whole current category (including its subcategories), or of the whole shop on shop and search pages; it does not narrow as other filters are selected.

Attribute filters

Each WooCommerce attribute can become a filter group (checkboxes). Shoppers can combine several — for example Socket: E27 and Colour temperature: Warm white — to narrow results precisely.

• Free: every attribute can be a filter — there is no cap. Products match if they have at least one of the selected values of an attribute (OR).
• Pro: per attribute you can choose All (AND) in Sections, so products must have every selected value — ideal for technical catalogues with many properties.

Stock, rating and special filters

Built-in filters beyond attributes:

• In stock — hide out-of-stock items.
• Rating — show only products at or above a star rating (off by default; enable it in Sections → Section visibility).
• On sale — surface promotions.
• New — show recently added products.

Category page context

When the filter sits on a category archive, it automatically scopes results to that category, so shoppers refine within the section they are browsing rather than across the whole store.

Pro extras

• AND matching — require all selected values of an attribute.
• Products per page — offer shoppers your own per-page choices.
• Exact swatch colours — set the precise colour shown for each colour value.
• Results cache — repeat filter results for logged-out visitors are served from a cache on your own site, refreshed when products or stock change.

Free vs Pro at a glance

Feature	Free	Pro
AJAX filtering with URL sync	✓	✓
Price range slider	✓	✓
Stock, on-sale, new & rating filters	✓	✓
Category page context	✓	✓
All product attribute filters (no cap)	✓	✓
Classic, block & XStore themes	✓	✓
AND matching per attribute	—	✓
Custom products-per-page choices	—	✓
Exact colour per swatch value	—	✓
Results cache	—	✓

Advanced notes

• XStore compatibility (Free and Pro): XStore renders shop pages with its own markup; the plugin includes specific integration so the filter hooks into XStore's product grid and AJAX correctly. On standard/generic themes the filter works without this.
• URL-driven querying: filters modify the main product query, so results are real WooCommerce queries (correct pagination, sorting and counts) rather than a client-side hide/show trick.
• Performance: filtering uses category context to keep queries scoped and fast even on large catalogues.

Troubleshooting

• An attribute isn't offered as a filter — confirm it is a global attribute (under Products → Attributes) and is assigned to products.
• Filtered URLs look broken or double-encoded — check that attribute slugs are plain ASCII.
• Filter looks unstyled on XStore — make sure the filter is on a WooCommerce shop or category page and clear any page cache.

To activate Pro (download from rotozoom.com and sign in through Rotozoom Connect), see Installing and updating plugins.