Auto Configure
Setting up filters by hand means picking, for every taxonomy on your site, one of fifteen display types, one of six hierarchy modes and one of eight container types — then loading the shop to see whether it looked right. For a store with six attributes that is an afternoon. For a store with a hundred it is a reason to give up.
Auto Configure does it for you. It scans a post type, works out a sensible filter for every taxonomy it finds, shows you each one with a live preview, and creates them where you choose.
Available since 6.41.
What it actually decides
Auto Configure looks at four things about each taxonomy — whether it is hierarchical, how many terms have products, whether those terms carry images, and whether they carry colours — and picks from there. On a typical clothing store:
| Your taxonomy | What it sees | What it creates |
|---|---|---|
| Product categories | hierarchical, 15 terms | Expandable tree with counts |
| Brands | 6 terms, all with logos | Image tiles with labels |
| Colour | 12 terms with colours set | Circular colour swatches |
| Pattern | 6 terms with images | Image tiles |
| Style | 250 terms, plain text | Checkboxes behind a button, with a search box, loading on demand |
| Material | 40 terms, plain text | Collapsed checkbox list with a search box |
| Size | 6 terms, plain text | Plain checkbox list |
| Product tags | nothing assigned | Skipped |
Each choice comes with the reason it was made, so you can disagree with it knowingly rather than guessing what the setting does.
Auto Configure judges size by the terms that have products, not the terms that exist. A taxonomy with 250 registered terms where only 120 are used is treated as a 120-term filter, and a taxonomy with terms but no products at all is skipped entirely — a filter there could never do anything.
Running it
Go to Super Speedy → Super Speedy Filters and press Auto Configure my filters. Five steps:
1. Scan
Choose a post type. Auto Configure reports what it found — how many taxonomies, how many terms between them, how many are hierarchical, how many carry images or colours, and how many were skipped as empty.
2. Review
One card per filter, ordered so the ones worth your attention come first: hierarchical taxonomies (your categories are almost always the most important filter), then anything with images or colours, then the rest by size.
Each card shows the choice, the reason, and a live preview of the real filter with your real terms and counts. Change the display type and the preview changes with it. The preview is rendered by the same code that renders your front end, so what you see is what shoppers get.
Each card also offers one-click alternatives — “Try circular image tiles”, “Try swatches with labels” — and a Don’t filter on this button for taxonomies you would rather leave out.
3. Layout
How the set hangs together, asked once rather than per filter:
- Sidebar list — each filter stacked and minimizable. The usual choice.
- Filter bar — each filter a button in a row, usually above the products.
- One button — everything inside a single popout. Good for mobile-first layouts.
4. Place
Where the filters go. What you are offered depends on your theme:
| Option | When it appears | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Add a filters sidebar to your product template | Block themes | Moves your products into a column and puts the filters in a sidebar beside them |
| A theme widget area | Classic themes with sidebars | Adds the filters to that sidebar |
| A Super Speedy shortcode area | Always | Adds them to an area you place with [ssf_widgets] |
| A template part | Block themes | Adds the filter blocks to the end of that part |
| Copy the blocks to my clipboard | Always | Changes nothing — paste them wherever you like |
Nothing is written until you confirm this step, and the confirmation names the exact destination.
5. Done
What was created, and how to undo it.
On a block theme, take the Add a filters sidebar to your product template option. Block themes have no sidebars of their own, so without it your only choice is a widget area that may not appear where shoppers expect filters to be.
Where each filter shows
As well as how each filter looks, Auto Configure decides where it appears. It checks which top-level categories each filter actually has results in:
- A filter with results across most of the store — colours, sizes, brands — is left visible everywhere.
- A filter whose results all sit in one or two departments is restricted to them. A screen-size filter on a store that only has screen sizes in Televisions and Audio is created with the condition
product_cat=televisions|audio, so clothing pages stop carrying a filter that could never apply to them.
The restriction is exactly the list of categories where the filter has results, so it is never hidden anywhere it had something to show. Subcategories inherit their department’s filters automatically.
This is a speed win as well as a tidiness win. A filter that would have shown nothing still has to count its terms before discovering that; a restricted filter skips the work entirely on pages where it does not apply.
Colour, size and brand are never restricted, however lopsided the catalogue looks — shoppers expect them on every page. And if the lookup tables have not been built yet, every filter is left store-wide and the review screen says so, rather than guessing from missing data.
Stores with a lot of taxonomies
Above 25 taxonomies, the Review step changes shape rather than asking you to look at hundreds of cards:
- the 10 most important get full cards with previews
- the rest become a table — taxonomy, term count, display, container — that you can change a row at a time
- a Set all remaining filters to… control changes the lot in one go
- Accept all suggestions skips straight to placement
The suggestions are good enough to ship as they are, and you can come back and change them later, so nobody has to review a hundred filters to get started.
Changing your mind
Press Auto Configure again. It is designed to be re-run:
- It updates what it created rather than adding a second set of filters.
- Anything you changed by hand is marked You changed this and is never silently re-decided. A Reset to suggested link puts it back if you want it back.
- Taxonomies added to your site since the last run appear flagged New.
- Undo this run removes exactly what Auto Configure created and nothing else.
Undo is thorough. If it built a sidebar into your product template, undoing puts your products back where they were — and if that template only had a custom version because Auto Configure made one, it removes that too, so your theme’s own template takes over again.
Auto Configure creates filters. It does not delete filters you built yourself, and Undo will not touch them either. If you want a hand-built filter gone, remove it the way you added it.
Colour swatches work first time
Colour filters are the one place where a filter can look configured and still render nothing useful — swatch colours live on the filter, so a colour filter with no colours set shows empty swatches.
When Auto Configure creates a colour filter it fills the swatch colours in from your terms, so the filter works the first time rather than after you set every colour by hand.
What it will not do for you
- It picks a presentation for the taxonomies you have. It does not advise you on which taxonomies are worth filtering on commercially.
- It does not run on its own. It writes to your sidebars and templates, so it is a button somebody presses.
- It does not reorder filters by how well they convert — that would need analytics Super Speedy Filters does not collect.
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