search posts

The Wordpress search by default looks through the title and content of all available posts and pages for given query words. But sometimes you might want to only search a certain category or search custom fields or some other criteria. On the Canine Lifeline site, we have a dog section where we want to be able to list dogs based on a number of parameters, such as age, gender, adoption status, et cetera. We are currently storing dogs as posts in a particular category, and using Magic Fields to add custom fields for various aspects of each dog.

Wordpress sends search queries as GET requests from its search form. The "s" variable contains the search query, but others are allowed. In fact, if you're familiar with the "query_posts" function, many of the parameters for that are available, and the rest can be enabled, because the search is basically just a regular Wordpress query with parameters appended from the GET variables.

I've been using Google's Webmaster Tools and more recently Yahoo's Site Explore…

I mentioned my concerns of using Wordpress as a CMS in a previous post, but now it is getting to be the time to find solutions to our problems. We have installed a test wordpress site and have begun working on it. The style is still bare, but I am looking at functionality issues. I used those links from the previous post plus some other sites found on Google to find potential solutions. I haven't made any final decisions yet on what should work for us, but I'll document some of my considerations

Events and Recipes

One issue we will have is needing custom data fields for the events and the recipes. Wordpress has custom fields built in, but it would be best if the fields could be there automatically, without them having to add them and get the names exactly right each time.

Flutter is one plugin solution that looks nice. It allows custom write panels to be created in the admin section, so that events or recipes could be managed and added separately from the normal posts. It allows custom fields to be defined for each panel as well. It even allows data types to be defined, so dates for the events could be entered easily. It does have some issues, such as some bugginess and rumored slowness when post numbers get high. This did sell me on the custom write panel idea though.

I am researching services that will take online donations for nonprofits. There…

I've been researching Wordpress as a CMS for potential use on my own sites, but…

We identified history buffs as one of the probable main visitors to the Stearn'…