Swiftype – WordPress Plugin For Enhanced Search

swiftype enhanced wordpress search

Swiftype is a new plugin on the block. It is designed as a replacement for the in-built search feature on your WordPress site. The main thing that’s cool about it is that it has an autocomplete feature which is commonly found on many modern websites such as Amazon, Google etc. That’s where you start typing something and before you’re even finished, you see a list of possibilities that would complete your search. This is how it looks on Amazon.com:

amazon autocomplete

It’s a pretty slick feature that will give your site a more modern feel. I tested it out on my local installation of WordPress and it works pretty nicely. It wasn’t quite as fast as I would have liked initially, but then, sites like Google and Amazon have trained me to expect almost psychic levels of autocomplete. However I will say that it seemed to get faster over time, meaning that if I searched for the same or similar thing multiple times, it produced autocomplete faster after the initial search.

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Make Posting To WordPress As Easy As A Facebook Status Update

Make Posting To WordPress As Easy As A Facebook Status Update

In a Google+ community recently someone wanted to know how they could make posting to their WordPress blog as quick and easy as posting to Facebook or Google+. When you post a link on those social networks, all you have to do is paste a url and  the title, description and image for the webpage you’re linking to are automatically generated,  so it’s very easy to quickly share information.

I recommended three possibilities to make posting to WordPress this easy (click to enlarge screenshots).

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First Look At WPMU’s Appointments+ WordPress Plugin

Appointments Plus WordPress Plugin

WPMU is a mainstay of the wordpress community. As their name suggests, they began as specialists in blogging about and writing plugins for wp multiuser setups (now known as Multisite). These days they cover pretty much all aspects of WordPress. If you’ve ever Googl-ed anything about WordPress, chances are you’ve landed on their blog at some point. Through their offshoot Premium WPMU Dev, they also have a killer suite of plugins and themes that they are always adding to.Their plugins are generally well thought out, well-coded and they have support. Most of their plugins are just $19, or you can get an “all-you-can-eat” membership which is great for developers and people that build a lot of WordPress sites.

I recently took their Appointments+ plugin (aff. link)  for a test drive. Online booking and scheduling is an area in which WordPress is still a little lacking. There are numerous solutions out there, but not really a killer one yet. When I first tried Appointments+ I wasn’t sure how it would stack up, and while there’s probably room for it to grow, as I tried a couple of other popular solutions I realized that it’s actually pretty decent. Now I haven’t used it consistently for a long time, so these are just my initial impressions. When I have it running on some live sites, I’ll report back how it holds up over time.

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