WordPress plugin turns your blogroll into a custom search engine

My colleague from Libraries Interact, TechExplorer, has created a WordPress plugin to help us easily manage our Google CSE.

At Libraries Interact we provide a list of Australian library blogs. Initially it was just a list,but then we thought it would be helpful to provide a search across all of the blogs on the list. So we started using Google CSE to do this. There were a few little bothers in managing this set up.

• We had to manually edit the page each time we wanted to add a blog
• We had to turn off the visual editor in WP every time so that we didn't break the script that embeds the Google CSE search box and displays the search results.
• We had a number of contributors who were updating the pages and the Google CSE but we couldn't all get access to update things like the default colours for search results.

TechExplorer created this plugin that has resolved all these for us. All of the Libraries Interact admins can now manage the whole process from within WordPress and the Google CSE is updated automatically. In addition, we don't have to edit the about page and make sure we have them in alphabetical order. It is all managed through the Blogroll functionality of WP, apart from the settings with are in the Options area of the WP dashboard.

Thank you Tech Explorer.

An explanation of how it works is available from : Turn your Blogroll into a Google CSE « Tech Explorer