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.

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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.

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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.

When you start to use WordPress as a CMS you begin to realize that one WYSIWYG area isn’t going to cut it. At that point you may start to explore the option of custom fields. They’re great, and they work well for handling small changes. But what happens when you need to have multiple WYSIWYG areas, or upload files, or manage content using other form fields like checkboxes, radio toggle’s or text inputs. To do this you’ll need the power of custom write panels. There are many ways to create them; some involve the use of plugins and some don’t. I’m going to discuss a few of the way’s I’ve created custom write panels, and explain the ups and downs of each approach. If anyone has any suggestions please leave your thoughts as comments; they may be added to the post in the future.

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The web agency I work for, Fresh Tilled Soil, has just launched a re-design for Blu Homes that’s built on top of a WordPress CMS.

It’s now featured on WeLoveWP.com and has a pretty good rating so far. Pretty much everything you see is being managed by WordPress with the aid of some handy plugins. If anyone has any questions about how the site was built let me know I’d be happy to shed some light on our work.

The site was designed by Liz Abbate Hyman and developed by Alex Federov.