BankAlt.com adds filtering, paging, sorting and more

Hi folks. I'm pleased to announce that I've been working on BankAlt.com for the past few weeks (in between other activities) and now I am happy to reveal some new features that everyone has been asking for. But first, here are some things to keep in mind:

• The site is still in beta
• There are still bugs and some missing features
• The biggest feature is still missing and it's being worked on

Having cleared this up, here's what is new on BankAlt.

Skill levels

I'm now displaying skill levels for each recipe. This refers to the profession level at which that recipe can be learned. It is a very important piece of data when dealing with recipes and I agree that it should have been there from the beginning.

Paging

I'm no longer dumping all the recipes under a profession on the screen at once. Instead, I'm paging the results in real time, with a default of 25 recipes per page. You can change the number of results that you wish to see by picking from 10, 25, 50 or 100. 

Sorting

You can now sort the results by 2 parameters: skill level and recipe name. Sorting is ascending or descending.

Filtering/searching

Search is another highly requested feature and I have implemented it (for now) in the form of a filter. By typing in the skill level or part of the recipe name, you'll be able to filter the results to those that are relevant to your keyword. Bear in mind that currently you can't filter by both fields at the same time. I'll see if I can improve the algorithm to allow this.

Other stuff

Minor stuff includes a darkening of the shade used to display green items and also an enhancement of the Expand button so that it's more obvious. A few users have missed the Expand button and didn't even know it was there.

Also, bear in mind that paging, sorting and filtering are done on the server side, in real time. There might be a short delay when taking these actions but testing so far has shown that it is a very short delay.

Things to come

There are a few things that I want to improve on.

The Expand button is not a great idea from what I've tested so far. It doesn't give any hints about the actual features that BankAlt.com offers. I am considering getting rid of it and simply displaying the full, expanded component tree directly on the screen. There are some performance issues with that though so I will have to think about it carefully.

I also want another search option, one that can be accessed from any section of the site.

Last, but certainly not least, is the other big piece of functionality that I am still working on and I'm sure will be of great use to many people.

Until then, stay tuned and please send me your feedback.