FEEDBACK WANTED:Is a filtered (Faceted) search available?

[Odettes]

An AJAX version of the Product Finder/ShopBy would also be nice.

[efficiondave]

I've been playing with this and it's an AWESOME start to this functionality. Very easy to use and saves me so much work and will be a wonderful feature for my clients.

The main addition I'd like is the ability to only display the Product Template based criteria after a category has been selected.

So for example, if a store sells books, music, and furniture. Someone shopping for a book wouldn't want to have to weed through the furniture options in order to find the options that relate to a book. You've got this in part already because as they select the categories it only shows relevant options for products in that category. But having someway to first make the user pick a root category before they see the other search criteria would be helpful.

I see a few (very rough) options for doing this:
-Let admins associate Product Templates with Categories and then only show the criteria associated with a template when that category has been selected
-Add an option somewhere where the admin can require at least 1 (or perhaps X) categories be selected before displaying product template criteria
-???