Search Globally, Replace Locally

We've all been conditioned over the last few years of using the web to find stuff by searching, instead of having to browse through a hierarchy to find information. Even Movable Type has had, since the early days, a basic internal search and replace feature. But we wanted to go further to make sure that pervasive searching was part of the platform with Movable Type 3.2.

Search (almost) everything

Movable Type 3.2 introduces a whole new search and replace interface. Now you can search not only entries, but a wide variety of items in the application:

• Entries
• Comments
• Commenters
• TrackBacks
• Activity Log
• Templates

What's more, once you're viewing your search results, all the power of Movable Type's new listings pages is available for managing and acting on the found items. Forget about hunting through listings for that particular Trackback or scrolling through an impossibly long Activity Log to find a plugin error; Now all the content of your blogs is just a simple search away.

Search Everywhere in the System

In this new version, the powerful search box is present in the upper-right corner of almost every single page of the application. If you'd upgraded from 2.x versions of Movable Type to 3.x and missed the ability to search from any page, you'll be glad to know that the familiar search box is back and better than ever.

Just click into the search box (or use the search shortcut key to jump to the field), type your query and find items you're looking for. The best part is that searches are always within context: If you're editing an entry, searches will automatically be targeted to entries, and if you're listing comments, searches will default to looking within comments.

Searching Templates, and Fearless Selective Replacement

One of the most exciting new areas of search functionality is being able to search and replace within templates. Whether you're tweaking an item across a number of templates, or you want to make large-scale changes to your site, you can now easily modify all your templates, or just select specific templates to apply changes to.

In addition, the user interface for searching's been extensively revamped, so the previously intimidating replace functionality is now a lot less scary to work with. You can now choose to replace matches in just a few selected search results or even constrain your search and replace to certain fields of those items. This allows you to do something like, for example, replace a particular portion of the linked file path in only four templates. Or just add a particular keyword to all entries containing a certain term.

We've seen from early testing that the new search power in Movable Type changes the way that users work with the system. Instead of filtering entries by category and then paging through a list, it's easy to just enter in the title or some entry text, or any other part of the entry you remember, and zip right to the entry you'd like to work with.

Search Through All Your Blogs

As always, we've wanted to make sure all the new features of Movable Type 3.2 are available to administrators, so the power and flexibility of these new search features is available at the system level as well. All the search and replace features are available for use across all of your weblogs, right from within the system-wide administrative features that we've described.

Want to change a detail of a template across 50 blogs? With Movable Type 3.2, that power is just a few clicks away. We're sure that you'll find an infinite number of uses for the platform's new searching power while working with your blogs.

[This is part seven in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]