A Better Way for Managing Drupal Content Pages

You’ve built a lot of content pages into your nonprofit Drupal site and have started to notice that finding pages through the admin interface can be a challenge.

By utilizing the power of Drupal views, managing your content can be a much easier and pleasant task. Let’s look at a before and after.

Before: The standard Drupal content admin view
Out of the box, Drupal gives you the ability to filter your content by status and content type. By default you may also have the ability to sort by date or alpha by clicking the column header of your table view.

This is very helpful when starting out with minimal content on your Drupal site. But if you have hundreds of pages to scroll through, this quickly becomes an ineffective approach to efficient content management.

After: An advanced content admin view
By creating an advanced content administrator view, you are able to customize your content filtering and introduce a search field for finding the content you need.

With a custom view you can add any content field as an option to filter on. For example, this becomes incredibly useful when you want to find all content created by a specific author.

Here are a few search and filter options that will help you tame an overwhelming content collection:

• Filter by Content type
• Search for Title
• Search Body content
• Filter by Author
• Filter for Publish status
• Sort by Post Date
• Sort Updated Date

Take custom content filtering one step further.
When you have multiple content types you may find that some types of content do not share similar fields and rise to a new level of content management. For example, if you have a content type for events this content may require unique fields such as location, start date, end date, and any number of custom event fields.

In this case it may prove useful to create a custom admin view specifically for searching and filtering through your events.

By cloning your advanced content view, limiting the view to one content type, and adding custom filtering and sorting fields, you can implement a robust interface for managing unique content. As your site continues to grow, adopting a practice of creating robust admin filtering for each category of content will make your overall content management experience much more effective and enjoyable.

Setting up an advanced content view
If you find you need specialized help with setting up an advanced content admin view, we are happy to help you with this process. We have implemented advanced content views as part of our standard practice with new development projects. If you spend a lot of time filtering and searching through your Drupal content, contact us to help you enhance or add a new content search for your administrators.