Using Fixed Filters

Fixed Filters let you control which records from your collection are displayed on your site. They act as simple rules that tell the site which rows from the collection to pull into a list or gallery, so only the content you want appears on the page.

Let’s take a look at an example. Imagine you’re building a website for a pet adoption agency. You have a single collection that includes every pet, whether they’re available, pending adoption, or already adopted.

Now, on your Adoption Page, you only want to show pets that are currently available. Instead of creating three separate collections for each status, you can use a Fixed Filter to display just the items where the status is “available.”

Now, let's see what happens when we connect a photo gallery to our collection. On our gallery, we can currently see every pet in the collection — even the ones that have already been adopted. That’s not a great experience for visitors. Imagine someone browsing your site, falling in love with a pet, and then clicking through to the bio… only to find out that the pet’s already been adopted.

By using a Fixed Filter, we can avoid that frustration. We’ll set the gallery to display only pets with a status of “Available”, so visitors see just the animals that are actually ready for adoption.

To make this work, we’ll need to edit our gallery’s connection settings. Click into “Filter and Sort”, and here you’ll see the option to add a Fixed Filter. We’ll set the Category to Status, which selects the “Status” field from our collection, and then choose to display only pets with a status of Available.

Once applied, the gallery will automatically hide any pets that are already adopted or pending, ensuring your visitors only see animals that are ready for adoption.