How can I filter entries by category and/or year on the frontend?

Question

On a current site the I have news entries archived by:

• Year (using Zoo Triggers)
• Category

In the sidebar of the each news template (index & detail) it simply lists the years entries appeared in and below that is another list of the categories the entries are categorized in. E.G.:

Yearly Archives

• 2012
• 2011
• 2010

Category Archives

• Category 1
• Category 2
• Category 3

Instead of static lists now the client is asking me to make each year and category a check box that can allow the user to select the years and categories of the entries they would like shown.

Examples include selecting:

• Category 1 + 2011 | shows all entries from Category 1 AND from 2011
• Category 2 + Category 3 | shows all entries from Category 2 OR Category 3
• 2012 + 2010 | show all entries from 2012 AND 2010

The only catches are:

• Site uses Structure
• Zoo Triggers is set up for yearly and category archives

My questions are:

• Is it possible to do this natively?
• Are there any add-ons available that I don't know about that can achieve this?

From my digging it looks like I should be looking at this as a custom "search" but I want to cover my bases first.

Answer 1

Don't think this is 100% suited to your requirements as I'm unfamiliar with Zoo Triggers but I needed to pull back Entries by year on a recent project and used:

Year Archives: https://github.com/ryanirelan/ri.yearlist.ee_addon.2.0

Hope that's of use.

Answer 2

Why not skip EE altogether and use jQuery Isotope? Your lists would be generated by EE of course but each would have a class applied and filtering would happen via JavaScript. If not then you're probably better off making life easier on yourself and using Low Search.