How to quickly search posts by title in Admin interface

Question

I have a site with thousands of posts, and in the admin interface I simply want to be able to find and edit posts quickly based on their title.

The default post search functionality matches on the entire content of each post, and I typically get hundreds of results for any given search. I then have to click though many screens to actually locate the post I want to edit, which takes a long time.

Ideally I would just like to start typing a post title, see an auto-complete list of matching posts, and then click on the one I'm looking for.

Does anyone know of a setting or plugin to solve this problem?

Answer 1

this question has been asked before, check out these answers: Limiting Admin Backend Search to Title

There are also plugin solutions, however:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/admin-search/

Answer 2

I could write code for the admin interface, but it would take a while, and I don't know of any plugins that do exactly what you want. This plugin might be good enough for your purposes, though:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-extended-search/

The no-code solution you would have to do from the front end. You would then new WPES Search Form widget to a private page, click the one you wanted from the search results, then click "edit page" in the admin bar. Not ideal, maybe, but you'd be up and running in 5 minutes. You just have to deselect Content and Excerpt in the plugin's "Extended Search" settings.

Out of the box, it changes the default search functionality. If you use search for other things on the front end, you can create a new "Setting Name" for title only and select that in the widget. There are also shortcode, php and html ways to activate the custom "Setting Name"