Change Query Arguments (filter) with jQuery/Ajax or PHP?

Question

I have a pretty complex wordpress-site for travelling. There's an "archive-hotels.php", a template for the custom-post-type "Hotels". Inside the CPT is a taxonomy called "City", so we can do this: domain.com/hotels/city. Works perfectly. Now there's a filter on the site, which should filter the shown posts by stuff that the author has added over custom fields (Advanced Custom Fields Plugin) like "Features" or "Price Range".

Now I'm not sure how to filter that query. With PHP? jQuery (there shouldnt be too much posts in hotels/city/)? or Ajax to work that dataload, which will be after years of publishing?

Domain www.business-travelling.de/hotels/hamburg

Answer 1

The permalink structure you've described above e.g..../hotels/hamburg/features/sea-face isn't really something that could be achieved by using custom fields. You would be better off creating a new taxonomy called 'features' and populating it with terms like 'sea-facing' and any others.

In order to do queries for multiple taxonomies I would recommend the excellent Query Multiple Taxonomies plugin by Scribu. This plugin will let your users build searches that span across more than one taxonomy e.g. city AND feature.

You could either use the filter widget that comes with the plugin or build your own if that doesn't quite cut it. Think in the long run this will prove simpler than messing around with more complex ajax requests or complex wordpress queries looking for combinations of custom fields.