Now, coming back to WordPress 2.8, i visited the WordPress blog to know about the new features in 2.8. There are some very nice features. My favorite are :

CodePress Highlighting in the Editor : Finally, i need not fire up my PSPad Editor for making small changes to the theme or the plugins.

New Widgets Interface : As i said, i never really had the chance to play with the Dashboard of 2.7, except for on my Demo and local Dev installations. So, the new widgets interface is really nice.

Screen Options : Enables us to set how many items to show per page. I have the habit of manually checking and deleting the comments marked as Spam. So, it is easier when all the comments are displayed in a single page.

Installing Themes from Dashboard : Previously this was possible for plugins. As promised, they’ve added the feature for themes too. Though i’ll never be using this, it’ll be useful for casual bloggers who like to change the look of their blog often.

So, if you’re thinking of updating to 2.8, delay no further. Its a worthwhile upgrade. Use the WPAU plugin to make the process as easy as sipping coffee.

WordPress, sure, is an awesome piece of blogging software. But, why is the search functionality of WordPress so poor ? What are the basic flaws ?

• Search results are sorted according to date, while all search results should be sorted according to relevance.
• WordPress searches only “title” and “content”. While that may be logical for a “blog”, the search SHOULD include comments, author, category etc.. For eg, when i search for “Hari”, it is supposed to bring up all the posts written by me, with the priority being as follows : 1) having “Hari” in title. 2) having “Hari” in post content. 3) having “Hari in comments. and 4) lastly, doesn’t have “Hari but was written by me. But what happens actually ? The top results are the posts which contain the word “sHARIng”. How funny…
• Another example is when i search for “Advertising”, it is supposed to bring up the posts from my Advertising category. But, only one post from that category actually appears in the results. Whether or not the post contains the term “Advertising”, i (a human) have classified it under Advertising. WordPress should give priority to my classification rather than some dumb SQL query.

I noticed that some of the top blogs on my Google Reader have replaced WordPress Search with alternatives.

• TechCrunch – uses Yahoo BOSS
• John Chow – uses Ligit
• Daily Mobile and Make Use Of and tons of others – use Google CSE

Is Google CSE the only Answer ?

Google CSE is a really good service. But, should you use it on your blog ? With the “google”ish layout and the Ads, you completely lose the blog feel of it. Also, for an average blog with many hundred or few thousand posts, the Google search algorithm is not absolutely necessary. You can live with certain changes to your WordPress Search algorithm. For details on tweaking your WordPress search, do take a look at this post.

Do you have any other suggestions to improve WordPress search ? Share with us in the comments.