Feed Filters?

Hi David,

Hope all's going well.

Am soon to launch a brand new version of {link saved}, and to date have found the flexibilty of using the Wordpress plugin great for previous site.

For this site am trying to acheive product filter 'tick boxes' similar to the boxes found here within the left-hand sidebar:

{link saved}

and the speed at which they operate when ticked.
Due to the nature of the garments, on merchant sites users have quite a bit of filter functionality based on garment sizes etc.

For example if we have a page: /vests/ and are using the shortcode: [pto search="vest"]

Are you able to point me in the right direction/recommend at all about how we would implement such filter boxes, for example "Colour" "Size" and "Brand"?

Is it possible to query the database directly for the filters, would we need to cache the results to get them so quick?

The merchant feeds am using are quite good, i.e. they have columns for "Size" "Colour" "Brand" and so on.

Will see what you think,

Thanks,

Stew