In Microsoft Word and most other word processors, there is a feature called Find and Replace. This can come in very handy if there i a certain word or phrase that has been systematically misspelled or misused over the course of an entire document. For example, you may have been writing it as WordPress when it should be WordPress. Without Find and Replace, you’d have to scan through and find all instances of “WordPress” yourself to manually change it.

Unfortunately, WordPress 2.7 does not have an integrated feature that is able to do this for you. While you could certainly try and open every post that you’ve ever written and use the “Find” feature in most web browsers, this can be incredibly time-consuming and you still might miss a few. That’s where the Search and Replace WordPress plugin can become incredibly useful.

In short, the plug-in allows you to search for a word or a string of words within an entire database, like the one that contains all of your blog posts. Finding this chosen string, which could be a word, URL, or anything else, the plug-in can then systematically replace all of its findings with a new term. Say I wanted to rename Beyond the Rhetoric to “Happy Blog.” Instead of fumbling through every instance of “Beyond the Rhetoric” to replace it myself, the plug-in can do the work for me.

More information about the Search and Replace plugin can be found at Bueltge.de. The site is in German, so you may need an online translator to understand all the instructions.