Content Audit

the Edit Page screen with the content audit notes, owner, and status boxes
Page

The Content Audit plugin allows you to perform a content inventory right in the WordPress Edit screens.

You can mark content as redundant, outdated, trivial, or in need of a review for SEO or style. The plugin creates a custom taxonomy (like a new set of categories) that’s visible only from the admin screens. Since the content attributes work just like categories, you can remove the built-in ones and add your own if you like.

You can also assign a content owner (distinct from the original author) and keep notes. The IDs are revealed on the Edit screens so you can keep track of your content even if you change titles and permalinks. The plugin supports custom post types.

The Content Audit plugin creates three new filters on the Edit screens: author, content owner, and content status. This should make it easy to narrow your focus to just a few pages at a time. When you’re viewing all your posts in Excerpt mode, the audit notes will be visible.

You can display the audit details to logged-in editors on the front end if you want, either above or below the content. You can style the audit message.

There is an option to automatically mark content as outdated after a period of time (a month, six months, a year, whatever). You can then set up email notifications, which will automatically alert the content owner (or the original author, if no owner has been designated) that the content needs to be reviewed. Each owner/author will be emailed a list, sorted by content type, with permalinks to the outdated entries. If the content doesn’t need to be updated, the user can remove it from the email report by unchecking the “Outdated” box and saving the post.

The Content Audit plugin supports the Google Analytics Dashboard plugin, which shows a sparkline of each post/page’s traffic. This will give you some idea of how popular an article is, which might influence your decisions.

download at wordpress.org get support at wordpress.org

Content Audit Screenshots

22 thoughts on “Content Audit”

  1. Now we’re talking *real* CMS capability!

    I like this auditing notion a lot. I don’t need it personally at the moment, but I suspect I might be poking through the code to investigate how you implemented. It’s got me thinking too (not sure that’s a good thing).

    Thanks for taking the time to do this work.

    • steph

      Thanks, Dave. The implementation is basically a custom taxonomy with a few default terms, plus a custom field for the notes. Then I did a little work with the filters that let you change the column displays on the Edit screen lists. There’s more stuff on the to-do list, but that’s the current version.

  2. Brendan

    There is some coding issues I can see. When you dont have a class assigned to the article it will show
    Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in /home/content/73/4266773/html/Apps/Travel/wp-content/plugins/content-audit/content-audit-report.php on line 79
    On the pages menu. Maybe there needs to be a classification for not yet audited.

  3. Is it possible to set the time on outdating, like a scheduled post? We have many posts offering specials, but they are time limited. It would help a lot to be able to set the date for outdating the post.

  4. rmlumley

    Greetings,

    I love this plug-in, but I’m working it on a dev side of our site and I’ve run into a few bugs.

    Once you select “Display content status, notes, and owner to logged-in auditors”, it stays on. I can change where it displays (above or below) – but unchecking it doesn’t remove the display.

    Finally, even though the site is less than a year old, checking “Automatically mark content as outdated if it has not been modified in 1 year” has marked every thing on the site as outdated.

    • Stephanie

      Thanks for letting me know! I’ve just posted 1.2.1. It takes care of the display issue, but not the outdate problem. That one’s going to take some more testing, and I’m pressed for time today. I’ll come back to it next week and see if I can get it fixed.

        • Stephanie

          Yes, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Would it be possible for me to get a WP export file of the site you’re working on? It would help tremendously to work with the same content you’re using, but I understand if it’s not something you can share.

          • rmlumley

            Unfortunately, I cannot give you an export of our website. If there is something you’d like me to try (perhaps disabling and re-enabling the plug-in), let me know.

  6. I would like the option of having template tags instead of only having it embedding the content audit status withing the content block. That way I could put it in the sidebar, or anywhere on the page I want.

  7. Is there any way to prevent an author from auditing their own posts? Many authors are marking their own submissions as proofread and reviewed when they have not been. Ideally they should see the status, but not be able to edit it.

    • Stephanie

      There’s no way to do that at the moment. I’ll work on that feature for the next version. A full implementation would have to check a lot of different scenarios, but for your purposes I can probably cook up something quick and dirty. I’ll email you later!

    • Stephanie

      OK, Scott, here’s a modification of the plugin that should prevent authors and contributors from editing their own audit fields. If this works for you, I’ll work on polishing these changes for the next version of the plugin.

      http://stephanieleary.com/downloads/content-audit-mod.zip

      This also includes a template tag for the notes. Just uncheck the option to display them on the options screen, and insert content_audit_notes($echo); where you want to display them. The $echo argument is optional; if it’s set to false, the function will return the notes for use in a string or something rather than echoing them to the screen.

      • Thank you. Thank is exactly what I needed. Now I can have editors or administrators audit the posts without fear of authors entering incorrect data.

        Ideally, there should be some tags they can change, and some that they can’t. For example, if I mark something as “needs editing” or “auto-generated” it would be nice to allow the author to uncheck that and resubmit it. But they should not be able to be check certain items like Proofread and Reviewed.

        I am not sure how to best handle this, so for the moment, preventing authors from editing the audit meta is the best solution. Maybe I need to have items that the authors are allowed to uncheck in the current content-audit, while coming up with some other way to indicate that an editor or administrator has reviewed it and/or approves it.

        What do you think?

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