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.

Design your search results like Google

Why re-invent the wheel when you can follow the leader? Google has carefully planned out the placement of everything on their search results page. Using this to our advantage we can create similar search results page designs in WordPress. Using a little CSS and PHP/XHTML you can easily transform your search results to look similar. Here’s what I’ve used for the NextUp Careers example just mentioned:

PHP/XHTML

<div id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" class="result">
	<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
	<div class="result-entry">
		<?php if (function_exists('relevanssi_the_excerpt')) { relevanssi_the_excerpt(); } else { the_excerpt(); } ?>
	</div>
	<span class="permalink"><?php the_permalink() ?></span>
</div>

CSS

span.relevanssi-query-term {
	background:yellow;
}
.result {
	margin:0 0 20px 0;
}
.result h3 {
	font-size:15px;
	border-bottom:none;
	margin:0 0 4px 0;
}
.result .result-entry {
	line-height:1.5em;
}
.result .permalink {
	font-size:12px;
	color:#86B443;
	margin-top:6px 0 0 0;
	display:block;
	line-height:1.5em;
}

By displaying results like this it makes it much easier to scan the page, allowing people to get where they want faster. Keep in mind that I set the search terms to be highlighted with a class of relevanssi-query-term on the Relevanssi plugin settings page.

Highlight search terms in the results

If you’re using Relevanssi or Search Unleashed, this feature is built in under the plug-in settings page. If your not, then check out:

• Highlight Search Terms will highlight search terms within WordPress generated search results or when referrer is a Google, Yahoo or Lycos search engine within posts using jQuery.

Adding pagination

There are a few ways to do this. I would recommend using the following plugins:

• WP-PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog. Open source themes like Thematic have begun to accept this plugin as a pagination standard. You can see an example of it in action at Lester Chan’s demo page.
• Paginator will add the “paginator3000″ paging navigation to your WordPress blog. A great example of how this pagination effect works can be seen on Made in England (scroll all the way to the bottom).

I’ve been using Thematic to drive many of my CMS installations, so WP-PageNavi has become my pagination plugin of choice. Below is the PHP, XHTML and CSS code I use to implement it on my sites.

PHP/XHTML

<?php if(function_exists('wp_pagenavi')) { // if PageNavi is activated ?>
 
<?php wp_pagenavi(); // Use PageNavi ?>
 
<?php } else { // Otherwise, use traditional Navigation ?>
 
<div class="navigation">
	<span class="older"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Older Entries') ?></span>
	<span class="newer"><?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries &raquo;') ?></span>
</div>
 
<?php } // End if-else statement ?>

CSS

/* =PageNavi
-------------------------------------------------------------- */
/* Using specificity to override PageNavi CSS */
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi {
    margin:0;
    padding:0.5em 0;    
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi a, 
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi span {
    border:1px solid #ccc;
    color:#666;
    font-style:normal;
    margin:0 .375em;
    padding:0.5em 0.75em;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi a:visited {
    border:1px solid #ccc;
    color:#666;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi a:hover {
    border:1px solid #FCB701;
    background:#FCB701;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi a:active {
    border:1px solid #ccc;
    color:#FCB701;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi span.pages {
    border:none;
    color:#666;
    margin:0 .375em 0 0;
    padding:0;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi span.current {
    color:#fff;
    font-weight:bold;
    background:#ccc;
    border:1px solid #ccc;
    font-weight:normal;
    margin:0 .375em;
    padding:0.5em 0.75em;
}
#wrapper .wp-pagenavi span.extend {
    background-color:#FFFFFF;
    border:1px solid #000000;
    color:#000000;
    margin:2px;
    padding:2px 4px;
}

Add spelling suggestions

Similar to the way Google works, it often helps to provide people with corrections to common spelling mistakes. To add this handy feature check out the following plug-ins:

• Search Suggest by Joost de Valk is a great little plugin that makes it possible to mimic search engine’s search behavior, by showing related searches and spelling suggestions.
• Sphider for WordPress has a “Did you mean” search suggestion on mistyped queries.

Record what people are searching for

If you actively track what people search for on your site you can begin to improve the way you title and tag your articles. When you start to do this for your site your general search engine rankings will likely improve as well. To start tracking your search queries checkout the following plugins:

• Search Meter automatically records what people are searching for. It will also track whether they are finding what they are looking for.

Other great articles about search enhancements and improvements

• Make WordPress’ search function suck Less. at Yoast
• 3 Codes for a Far Better WordPress Search Page by Pro Blog Design

What do you do to improve the search on your WordPress website?

Let me know and I’ll add your suggestions to this article, with a shout out and link to your site.

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.

How to handle Chris’s specific scenario with WordPress

Now, how could we go about handling the specific predicament that Chris is encountering?

• You could use the More Fields plugin to add additional editing fields to WordPress, making it function similar to the way MODx does.
• Next, you could tap into the WordPress Page Tree plugin to make managing 100+ pages easy.

For more considerations on deciding whether or not WordPress is the right choice, be sure to check out Devlounge’s amazing post, Things to consider when using wordpress as a CMS. Chris, best of luck. Let me know how it goes and what you finally decide on.

Choose what you’re most comfortable with

At the end of the day, I say use what you feel works best and are comfortable with. I’m sure you’ll find that if you hang around the MODx forums, the trend will be that MODx is the choice to go with. If you hang around the WordPress forums, I wouldn’t doubt that the opposite is true. It’s all perspective. If you’ve spent your time focusing on learning one solution over another, of course you’re biased towards promoting that solution; because you know it far better. You know what’s better about your system, because you don’t know the potential of alternatives. Be open minded, you may just learn something.

Any other thought’s out there? I’m all ears.

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.

WiseStamp also makes it easy to add links to your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. As an alternatives, some people praise the use of the Canned Responses, Labs addon. This is just as good, and proves to be a better solution for some. Personally I prefer the automated process associated with WiseStamp, adding a signature is automatic which is great.

Get Started

1. Open the Firefox web browser – If you’re not using it, you check it out
2. Download & Install Wisestamp
3. Follow the 5 First Steps with Wisestamp instructions to create your signatures

Take A Demo

For more information check out Molly’s video for an in depth walk through.

A new con-caution by John Resig called Sizzle has recently caught my eye. It’s a series of JavaScript files that you can add to your website to improve your JS Selector capabilities, adding advanced CSS3 selectors to jQuery and other JavaScript libraries.

Sizzle Browser Support

• Firefox 2.0+
• Internet Explorer 6+
• Safari 3+
• Opera 9+
• Chrome 1+

By using this library you can effectively do more with less CSS code, and even replace some of your JS and server-side logic.

A Few Good Reasons

By using Sizzle you’ll also become familiar with CSS3 selectors you’ve probably never used, and will likely use in the future. In an ideal world we would all take the time to learn these and use them in our everyday work, but more often than not it’s simple not possible because of older browser’s and their lack of support (Internet Explorer). By providing full support of CSS3 in Internet Explorer 6 and up, Sizzle helps to solve this issue.

Other Features

• Provides meaningful error messages for syntax errors
• Optimized for performance – only 4KB when gzipped and minified
• Completely standalone (no JavaScript library needed)
• Created by a rock solid JavaScript developer, expect to see enhancements well into the future.

I haven’t yet used Sizzle, but based on most of John’s other work I think it sounds pretty promising. I’ll be playing around with it in furure work, if anyone has anything to add please do.

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.

Child Themes for Modular Theme Developement

With this realization in mind I discovered Thematic, which boasts abilities way beyond our Base theme by harnessing the power of the open source crowd. Thematic will allow you to begin your next custom theme with a solid set of pre-built functions, styles and scripts that make the process faster and quality better. Thematic uses a feature of WordPress called child themes, which has been long since ignored since it’s addition to the core. Using child theme relationships you can keep your customizations separate from the original Thematic install, making maintenance and updates easier.

Thematic Features

A few features of Thematic that caught my eye include:

• Browser and OS body classes for realistic cross browser testing. Yes browser targeting is the devil, but let’s be realistic here; it’s unavoidable.
• A simple, well built, dynamic drop down menu that is automatically generated based on parent/child page relationships in WordPress.
• Pre-styled typography for that looks great in all browsers for virtually anything you can include in a post.
• Speed optimization
• Search engine optimizations
• Backed by a community, so it’s been through rigorous testing
• Extra widget-ready areas—13 in total and more possible in your Child Theme
• Various layout options for 2, or 3 column designs
• Fully compatible with popular WordPress plugins like All in One SEO & Platinum SEO

The Selling Point

The true selling point for me is the ability to differentiate your customized source code from the original downloaded Thematic code with a child theme. Let’s say you have 50 clients with custom themes setup as Thematic child themes, you could quickly and easily provide those clients with new features as newer versions of Thematic are rolled out, without harming any customizations. If for some reason a theme customization did break during an install, you can simply revert back to the working version of Thematic and report the issue to the community for support.

There are a few other WordPress theme frameworks out there, Thematic just happens to be the one that caught my eye. To mention a few:

• Whiteboard
• Theme Hybrid
• WP Framework
• Carrington

I would love to hear some other opinions about the other options that exist, and why they may indeed be better. Please don’t hesistate to post your feedback.

I’ve always known that something wasn’t quite right with corporate websites, and after seeing things like Dustin Curtis’ mockery of American Airlines, I couldn’t help but explore the topic furthur. Why is it so hard for a large corporations to create successful strategies online? Bureaucracy.

I’ve recently published an article about the various frustrations of working with corporate clients in the web design world. It’s located on the new Fresh Tilled Soil: What’s Fresh blog.

Luckily, there is finally some proof out there that you can use to start driving more conversion on your website using specific copyrighting styles. Dustin Curtis has recently posted about his little You Should Follow Me on Twitter experiment. Using AB testing, Dustin was able to test various ways of getting people to follow him on twitter to find out which combination achieved the highest conversion rate.

The Results are Astonishing

• Starting with a statement: “I’m on Twitter.” 4.70%
• Switching to a command: “Follow me on twitter.” 7.31%
• Trying a stronger personal command: “You should follow me on twitter.” 10.09%
• Adding the literal callout “here”: “You should follow me on twitter here.” 12.81%

The final result was a 173% increase in conversion rates.

Not bad at all.

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.

Development & Plugins

1. Noupe.com’s WordPress Category – Noupe has some great lists and articles available in a setup similar to Smashing Magazine.
2. Yoast – Though not directly focused on WordPress, Joost de Valk has some some great articles about WordPress and has also contributed a great deal to the community at large by creating some very useful plugins over the years.
3. Weblogs Tools Collection – A great resources for marketing your blog, and improving it with the latest tools and plugins.
4. WPCandy – A great resources dealing specifically with WordPress and nothing else. Topics include: WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tips, Tricks, and more.
5. Lorelle on WordPress – Lorelle has been writing about all things WordPress since the beginning of time it seems. She has some great articles that talk about WordPress’s inner functionality, extendability through the use of plugins, troubleshooting and all things developer related.
6. WPShout – A newer one I’m less familiar with, it’s entirely focused on WordPress and looks pretty promising.

Marketing & Profitability

1. ProBlogger – ProBlogger is focused on marketing, writing and selling  your blog. They have some invaluable articles that discuss writings styles, how to profit off of advertising, and how to reach your audience.
2. Upstart Blogger – More focused on the topic of blogging for profit in general, this one is a great resource for anyone who runs their own professional blog.

Design

1. WeLoveWP – A design gallery to help you get inspired before your next design, or to realize that WordPress really can power beautiful, elegant websites.
2. WPDesigner – A design focused blog specializing in WordPress.
3. Vendelay Design: WordPress Category – This could have made it to the development list above, but since it’s by a design firm I figured that “design” was more appropriate. Needless to say they have some pretty great WordPress articles relating to both design and development.

Suggestions?

This list is far from complete. Show me up and let me know some of your favorite source of high quality WordPress information!