27th November 2023 J3
xbArticleMan is a component to provide some additional tools for backend administration of Joomla content. It provides views for finding Images, Links, Shortcodes and Tags in, or associated with, com_content articles.
Version 2.1.0 is a major update with many minor and major improvements. Work started on it back in 2019, but it was put aside for nearly 4 years before finally being picked up again. It is still not Joomla5 compliant, although most of the code has been updated. I still run J3 sites exclusively with no plans to migrate to J5 as there is too much work invested in custom extensions for particular sites to make it worth the effort.
Currently it offers six views in the backend:
- Dashboard - a summary of the counts of articles, tags, images, links and shortcodes
- Articles:tags - details of the tags assigned to each article
- Articles:links - shows the <a ...>...<<> tags in the content, and the related links fields for each article
- Articles:images - shows the <img .../>tags in the content, and the intro/full image fields for each article
- Articles: Shortcodes - lists all of the plugin shortcodes found in each article
- Article Edit simplified - a simplified article edit screen which allows editing of title, alias, category, tags, and the image and link fields for an article.
On the article tags list view the batch tool allows both assigning and removal of tags from selected articles. (a facility always missing in J3 and partially added in J4)
On all the list views clicking the article title goes to the simple edit view for the article, clicking the icon goes to the full com_component edit view, and clicking the provides a modal preview of the article.
On the article links view there is a button to check for broken links - because external sites can take a significant time to respond this is restricted to only checking up to 20 external links at a time. If there are more than 20 external links displayed you need to filter down to reduce the number to be checked. The icon after the link provides a modal preview of the destination.
On the article:images view the icon gives a modal preview of the image
Roadmap
Improvements and bug fixes
- Minor layout improvements for consistency between all views
New features
- v2.2.0 Add a tag view to show all of the items assigned to a particular tag across components.
to include ability to add/remove articles from the tag - v2.3.0 Add a category view listing all the articles assigned to each category
- ... open to suggestions
Changelog - click here
