Allow more than two taxonomy filters in the shop sidebar (custom product taxonomies)
Hi team — first, thanks for FluentCart. It's been a pleasure to build on.
I've run into a limitation with the shop page filter sidebar and wanted to suggest an improvement.
The limitation
As far as I can tell, the shop filter sidebar supports exactly three facets: Product Categories, Product Brands, and Price. That's because FluentCart ships only two product taxonomies (Categories and Brands), and there's no way to register or enable additional ones that show up as their own filter box. So the practical ceiling is two independent taxonomy filters, and both are already spoken for.
What I'm trying to do
My store isn't traditional retail — it's a catalogue of educational programs and digital recordings. My products naturally sort along several independent dimensions at once:
- Teacher / presenter (multiple different people)
- Series (several distinct series and collections)
- Format / type (training, membership, seminar, webinar, etc.)
A single product often belongs to one value in each of those dimensions simultaneously. What I'd love is for a shopper to see several separate multi-select filter boxes down the left rail — one per dimension — and combine them freely (e.g. "this teacher" + "webinar format").
Right now, because I only get two taxonomy boxes, I'm forced to cram all three dimensions into the single Categories taxonomy. The result is one long, flat filter box that mixes people, series, and formats together — which is confusing to browse and defeats the purpose of filtering.
What I'd like (ideally native)
The ability to create/register additional custom product taxonomies (beyond Categories and Brands) that:
- appear as their own multi-select filter box in the shop sidebar,
- have a configurable display name,
- support hierarchy and a product count, like Categories already do.
Even a simple "add custom taxonomy" option that surfaces in the same filter settings would completely solve this. A related nice-to-have would be filtering by product attributes as facets too.
Why I think it's broadly useful
This isn't niche to me. Any store whose catalogue has more than two meaningful axes hits the same wall — course/LMS sellers (instructor, level, topic), media and audio libraries (artist, genre, format), digital-download shops, membership sites. WooCommerce covers this via custom taxonomies and attribute filters, and it's one of the few gaps I notice when comparing. Supporting it natively would make FluentCart a much stronger fit for content- and knowledge-based stores, not just physical retail.
I'd much prefer a native solution over custom-coding a bespoke shop template, so I wanted to raise it here. Happy to share more about my exact use case if it's helpful. Thanks for considering it.
You can register your own custom taxonomies and they will be auto discovered and added to the filter sidebar
Example
add_action('init', function () { register_taxonomy('teacher', 'fluent-products', [ 'label' => 'Teachers', 'public' => true, 'hierarchical' => true, 'show_ui' => true, 'show_in_rest' => true, ]); }, 20);
Taylor Drayson Thanks Taylor. One flag for others on FluentCart 1.6.1: registering the custom taxonomy works fine and it shows in the product admin, but it does not auto-appear in the storefront filter sidebar. The shop wp:fluent-cart/products block stores an explicit filters list in its attributes (product-categories, product-brands, price_range), and the sidebar only renders what's in that list — a newly registered taxonomy stays invisible until it's added there too. Once I added our taxonomies to the block's filters config, they showed up perfectly. So on 1.6.1 it's register taxonomy + add to the block's filters, not fully auto-discovered. Is the auto-discovery landing in a newer release, or is there a hook to have the sidebar read all product taxonomies?
Brett Chitty Once a public taxonomy is registered for fluent-products, edit the Shop/Products block and open its filter settings. The custom taxonomy should appear there with its own toggle. Enable that toggle, save the page, and it will appear as a separate filter in the storefront sidebar.
So the process is: register the taxonomy, enable it in the block settings, and save the page. “Auto-discovered” means it becomes available in the block settings; it does not mean the storefront filter is enabled automatically.