Discussion Forum

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Development Content Flags

This idea is out there, so take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it could spark other ideas as well. One of the frustrations I have when developing, or redesigning large websites, is the ability to monitor which pages will require something (anything) at later phases of development. For example, I'm currently working on transitioning/refreshing content from an old website into our BigTree install. As we enter content, there are certain pages that require links to content that does not exist yet. As it is, whenever we come across a word that needs to be hyperlinked, or a page that needs a form that hasn't been created yet, we'll manually enter some predefined shortcodes that we thought up:

[[hyperlink]]
[[contact]]
[[needs_content]]

It might be kind of nice if the editor included an optional development module, which could insert similar shortcodes, or somehow flag the page by pressing a  button. After development, the site could run a report in the dashboard to generate a list of pages that contain one or more shortcodes/flags, so the team could begin pinpointing content that needs to be completed. As it stands, this could probably be accomplished by enabling a few checkbox field types in the content templates during development. As far as reporting goes, a simple database query could identify pages with the associated fields enabled.

However, this is probably more of a candidate for an extension, rather than being included in the core files. Maybe there is a better way of doing this, that I'm oblivious to. I'm curious to see how others deal with this as efficiently as possible.

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Development Content Flags

Flagging pages / module items is a sensible addition (maybe even with an additional note / person to target). I've added it to the possible 4.3+ roadmap for consideration!

In the meantime, you can always use the admin's search feature. Putting in [[hyperlink]] and hitting enter should bring you to advanced search results for all pages / module items that contain that string.