It’s great that WordPress has a search feature built in, but it’s not the most powerful engine and has various usability issues. Here’s a few suggested improvements you can do to improve your WordPress sites searchability.

Sort results by relevance instead of date

The pre-packaged WordPress search will order it’s results by date rather than relevance. Normal search engines sort their results by relevance, as you would expect. To change this I recommend using one of following plugins:

• Relevanssi replaces the WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance instead of date. It is a partial match search, so if user inputs several search terms, the search will find all documents that match even one term, ranking highest those documents that match all search terms. All in all this is a very smart search enhancement to use, and one that I choose to use on all CMS installs I build.
• Search Unleashed by Urban Giraffe is a more advanced search algorithm tool allowing for more customization in how your search engine works. It extends the standard WordPress search with customizable search algorithms, including MySQL’s full text and Zend’s Lucene. It includes a word highlighting feature along with the ability to search across posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, and meta-data.
• Search Reloaded by Semiologic, as suggested by Yoast, will let you use Yahoo! to power your site’s search engine.
• Google Custom Search will use Google to power your WordPress search engine. The downside to this approach is the lack of design control you have over the output of results.
• Sphider for WordPress will use an entirely new search engine within WordPress. Sphider is a lightweight PHP/MySQL search engine / spider tool. Sphider supports all standard search options, but also includes a plethora of advanced features such as word auto-completion, spelling suggestions etc.

Continue Reading…

I recently received this email from a reader, and wanted to address it here for everyone.

Hi Kevin,

Great site, portfolio, and articles.

I had a quick question if you can spare some time…

I’ve worked with Wordpress for about a year now, and have lately wondered if something like Modx is more appropriate for larger sites.  I love working with WP, but the approach with Modx is nice.  The only reason why I have wavered is that WP doesn’t seem as well geared to facilitate a 200 page site.  Unless there is a hidden plug-in that I don’t know about that allows for each page management that you know about?

I’d like to continue to work with WP because if a client wants to sell online, easy implement.  Easy managing of a lot of basic things like forms, media, etc.

But other things like multiple fields, where Modx excels at out of the box, is always done with a plugin etc.  Or even the page management that I’m talking about, again, that modx does great out of the box.  It just seems like more of a real CMS to me, but Wordpress seems to have so many plugin solutions that make things very easy.

Any insight to this would be much appreciated.  I hate thinking that I’m not using the best system and sometimes its hard to find good comparisons online.  I was thinking since you’re such an avid WP user, that you could sway me back toward WP. ;)

Thanks for your time Kevin,

Best Chris

I would like to start by saying that I have little hands on experience with MODx, but have used similar options such as SilverStripe, and believe that both are very powerful and well built tools in their own right. By no means do I advocate that they could not handle this job well, I am simply stressing that WordPress is capable of handling many common CMS scenarios as well. It doesn’t deserve the bad rep it get’s.

I constantly see criticism of WordPress being strictly for blog use, and it really has great potential as a CMS. With the most robust plugin library around, you can quickly bolt on functionality as needed.

WordPress plugins are not “hacks”

I constantly see arguments against using WordPress as a CMS because you need to “hack” it in order to make it work. I think this is a misunderstanding best explained by the bad taste left in your mouth after troubleshooting issues that result from a faulty plug-in. The real trick is knowing how to choose the right plugins for the job, along with gaining a thorough understanding of the WordPress functions available for use in your themes.

Choosing the right plug-in for the job

A few rules I live by when choosing a plug-in for a specific CMS setup:

1. Be sure that it has a decent sized amount of supporters & users. This will tell you that most of the frequently encountered issues you may face have likely been solved already. You can usually gauge this by the number of downloads that plug-in has.
2. Be weary of using plug-ins with lower than a 3 1/2 star rating. Take this with a grain of salt, as you never really know why those ratings were given. This is just a general rule of thumb I tend to follow.
3. Be sure that the plug-in is compatible with the latest build of WordPress. This tell’s you that the plug-in is still being supported and developed. It probably has a decent sized community of users behind it contributing to it’s code too.

Continue Reading…

If you’ve ever modified a WordPress plugin to suite your needs you know how frustrating the auto update feature can be. I work with a team of WordPress developers and we’re constantly dealing with lost source code caused by clients upgrading there plugins with the one click updates feature that is now built into WordPress. This is no fault of the client, as they should be able to upgrade plugins as necessary.  The ideal solution would be to remove the auto update/upgrade feature on a case by case basis as needed.

Until now I have struggled with creating a solutions for this, but thanks to Mark Jaquith’s blog post, Excluding your plugin or theme from update checks, you can now do this with ease.

Visit Mark’s site to get the code

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

Packt Publishing has released it’s results for the 2009 Open Source CMS Award’s and has found that WordPress is the best content management system/platform of 2009. This is great news — now I can point the non-believers out there to something when they scoff at my praises for the platform. Oh it’s also great for other reasons as well, of course.

I’m impatient, show me a Thematic demo first

I’ve always kept my eyes open for a fresh WordPress starter theme to use for my next custom theme project. In an ideal world I would always use the same template to begin with, and that template would be caste in silver and polished with gold, but let’s be honest here. I’ve used my fair share of starter themes, and have found myself moving from one to the next from project to project. Partially because I have the attention span of a goldfish, but also because I’ve never truly been satisfied with the themes I’ve tried. I’ve even spawned my own home grown theme, called Base, which we now routinely use in our WordPress CMS processes at Fresh Tilled Soil. I’ve been pretty satisfied with the Base theme, mostly because of the self worth that comes along with using it, but as always I have this inkling in the back of my head that we could be doing things better by harnessing the power of many, rather than just a few.

Continue Reading…

WordPress is quickly becoming one of the most well known open source PHP platforms for content management. Surprising, there is a lack of quality literature out there for professional designers and developers looking to learn more about working with the platform. In my opinion this is because WordPress is a constantly changing beast. Write a book on WordPress one year, and it will quickly be out of date the next. This makes it undoubtedly hard for traditional writers to keep on the cutting edge of things.

If you’re a developer I recommend reading the many high quality sources of information available on the web. This is really the only way to stay on the bleeding edge of things. I’ve decided to share with you the sources I frequently read, and hope that you can contribute some ideas to make this list grow as time goes on.

Continue Reading…

WordPress has robust login system built in that is often under used because of it’s design restraints. Anyone that create’s an account and edit’s their profile info may be confused when they see the WordPress backend. It would be ideal to have your login, create account, and edit profile screens look like the rest of your site. This is easier to do than you think.

Recently I worked with a client that requested a similar feature. Because of their less than tech savvy audience, they wanted to have a local avatar system that was dead simple. Here’s a video explanation of the system I setup to handle the situation. Even though I am addressing the client directly, this provides a great introduction to how everything works.

Continue Reading…