Facets were introduced in eZ Find 2.0 to enable you to create browse-based search functionality. In other words, the search results can be further narrowed after the original search has been made. This is sometimes called “drilling down” into the results. Facets refer to the characteristics of the content objects in the results, such as their class, author, and translation. The default templates provide some simple facet examples, although eZ Find is capable of providing much more functionality.

In order to use facets you must customize the search templates. To make this easier, the template operators facetParameters and filterParameters have been added, which provide default parameters to implement facet functionality. Facet-related parameters are described in more detailed in the next section about the eZ Find fetch function.