I frequently get very frustrated using WordPress. This is most often my own fault, or rather my lack of knowledge. I’ll be certain that a way I want to display data, or manipulate it, or extract it from my database, must be possible. I just don’t know how … yet. This usually results in hours of research, trying to learn how to do it with CSS or PHP.
Sometimes there are plugins around which will do – more or less – what I want, though as part of rebuilding the site I’m doing my best to avoid using these whenever possible. I’ve got it into my head – rightly or wrongly – that bloating the site with too many plugins will slow it down.
One thing currently annoying me though that is, in my opinion, one WordPress failure is the lack of a simple inbuilt Search and Replace function when editing a post’s content. Even the most simple word-processing programs, like Notepad, have this, yet WordPress doesn’t. Sure, there are plugins out there to Search and Replace throughout my entire database, or I could do that myself running an SQL query. However, I don’t want to apply changes to all of my database, just to the text I’m working on.
Its absence is being emphasized to me right now because as part of the site rebuild I’m stripping out inline CSS and consolidating the stylesheets, trying to use CSS more intelligently than I have in the past. This can lead to wanting to try different CSS classes on an entry’s parts. Most of the pages I’ve just been working on, those in the Funny | Lists category, are built using lots of divisions within a grid. I want to see how a page would present using different grid classes. I could, of course, use page-specific CSS so only typing the class name once, then controlling its appearance through the stylesheet. However, this would bloat the stylesheets unnecessarily, so I’m trying to use just a few standard classes and applying them, in turn, until I find what best suits the content being displayed.
This would be so much easier to do with an inbuilt Search and Replace function!