Overcome the limitations of Drupal's built-in content list using Content Management Filter

Posted Sep 17, 2009 // 1 comments

The built-in content list provided by Drupal does a few basic things well, allowing you to filter by taxonomy term, status, and node type. However, in cases where you have a large volume of content or a lot of custom CCK fields, this doesn't quite cut it.

In the past, we would commonly run into issues and questions like:

• Can I add a filter for "author" to the Content list?
• Can I filter by keyword?
• Can I increase the number of nodes shown at a time to perform bulk updates more efficiently?
• Can I sort the content list using the column headers?
• Can I get a list of content that was created within a specific date range?
• Can I add a filter for a custom CCK field?

In many cases, we were ending up building custom views/filters that administrators could use to perform these types of functions. The drawback there is that you lose things like bulk updates, incremental filtering, etc.

Enter the Content Management Filter module, which knocks down all of these barriers (and more).

Here's a screenshot of the UI:

There isn't yet a means of adding a filter for a custom CCK field via an administration UI, but from what I am told the code is structured in a way that embraces such customization. 

Pretty powerful stuff that goes a long way in terms of streamlining workflow for content creators and editors.

Check out the Content Management Filter module page on Drupal.org.

UPDATE: I recently found out that Content Management Filter allows you to manage comments in a similar fashion, which is really awesome. This makes it easy to delete comments in bulk from a particular user, as deleting the user's account does not remove the comments that user created.