In this episode, we're taking on the big task: building the product browser! We start off by grabbing the necessary markup and talking through each section of our product browser, discussing what each piece does—from navigating categories, displaying category children, filtering by things like color and size, and showing matched product counts.
We build a Livewire component named ProductBrowser
to make the experience dynamic. Initially, we're just pulling all products straight from the database to get things up and running quickly. But then, we take a step further by integrating with MeiliSearch. That means, instead of showing every product, we selectively fetch products relevant to the selected category using a search filter.
There's some tinkering to get categories and products set up in the database, and then we see how to filter products by their categories on the fly using MeiliSearch filters. We also make sure the UI updates to reflect just the products that match the chosen category, and we display the count of matched products for instant feedback.
To wrap things up, we do a quick navigation polish—replacing "dashboard" with "categories" and tidying up the navigation links to make things feel coherent and user-friendly. By the end of this one, you have a fully working dynamic product browser wired up to MeiliSearch, showing real-time updates as you browse categories!