Today I am happy to announce the latest update to the Trailpost platform with a bunch of changes both big and small to help you plan your outdoor trips. The most significant addition is Trailpost’s new search engine along with a collection of design changes to support this, and future enhancements.

Trailpost Search

Over the past few months, as we’ve run beta tests and talked with Trailposters about the things they love (and don’t love) about Trailpost, a few common themes kept coming up related to finding stuff within the system. In most cases, Trailposters wanted ways to locate a pack or locker item quickly to make a change, rather than clicking around a bunch of times, and also to be able to search the community for other people’s packs to review and get ideas.

While previously Trailpost allowed you to search items from within your locker or a pack, there was no universal way to just “find something” quickly and easily through a single interface. As a result, we sat down and started redesigning the overall look and feel of Trailpost to bring search to the forefront as a primary action in the site header.

From now on, if you’re looking for something, just type some keywords into the search box in the header (or click the magnifying glass icon to enter search mode on smaller devices) and go. Currently, Trailpost returns search results for the following things:

Your locker items

Your pack items

Your packs

Other Trailposters’ packs

Other Trailposters accounts

The search engine will prioritize results for your packs & items so you can quickly jump to a specific pack or locker item, but will also return other Trailposters’ packs so you can discover how other people are planning their adventures as well.

If you’re interested in looking what’s in the packs of people who planned packs for the Pacific Crest Trail or people who pack gear made by Zpacks just click the links and start exploring!

Redesign

To support the new search functionality, we also embarked on a general redesign of many aspects of the Trailpost website.

Layout

We updated the overall design of Trailpost to add global search to the site header, and we introduced a navigation sidebar to support the growing number of navigation items as we continue to add more features to the site. On large screens, the side navigation will stick around, and on smaller devices such as tablets and phones, you can find it by clicking the three-line navigation icon in the header.

Locker

We have completely redesigned the locker management interface from the ground up to make it easier to deal with keeping your locker up to date.

You now stay on the same page when adding and editing locker items.

Sorting locker items is now accomplished by clicking the column headers and allows sorting in both ascending and descending directions, something which was not previously possible.

We have updated the locker designs to distinguish between Trailposters managing their own locker items and viewing other members’ lockers so that we can optimize each experience separately.

What’s next?

This recent round of updates took a lot of work, but it adds valuable features that we believe will be useful to Trailposters today while also laying the foundation for future updates.

One of the primary hidden purposes of building our search engine was so that we can begin exposing Trailpost’s internal gear database to Trailposters. Once complete, this database will be used to help provide known weights for locker items belonging to people who do not have the ability or inclination to weight all their gear. Additionally, Trailpost will be able to provide comparison shopping between retailers who sell gear and unlock a plethora of possible future features such as product reviews, statistics about which product are most popular, and more.

Thank you for being a Trailposter now (or in the future) and please let us know what you think of the updates!