WordPress Wednesday – Technical Tips

In today’s post, I’d like to share a WordPress tip that is extremely useful but also highly under utilized.

The Search functionality.

When you have been blogging for some time, it’s quite common to come across one of the following scenarios:

You try to recall a former post you yourself have written – because you want to share it with someone.


While writing a post, you want to link another post and you do not recall the title.
You want to update an older post.
You are writing a new post and would like to duplicate an older post to use as a template.

You get the gist.

Here are some cumbersome ways to do it:

– Scroll through the post on your dashboard under Posts.

– Use the Search tool on your site. If you do not have one, go through the step of adding one via the widgets function.

– Do a Google search with relevant terms and your blog name.

All these work. But they are clunky. Not to mention we still need to go back to the dashboards to search (scroll) if we want to edit.

The best feature to use in such cases is the Search functionality within the dashboard and posts itself.

Here are the exact steps to take:

1. Navigate to the dashboard if starting out.

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2. Go to blog posts- Published ones.

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3. Type in your query for the post.

I used the example of “food” to retrieve a book Review titled ‘Food of Love’ years ago.

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The one I needed was second in the search results.

4. I even tried a different tag- I wanted to get my safari adventures post. I started typing Cumberland but after the first three letters , I got my ideal post.[image error]

5. Best of all, you can edit or view the post directly as required for our original purpose. Yahoo!!

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Have you used this feature?

What is your experience- let me know in the comments below.