This plugin adds a Content Report option to the Tools menu. Use the tool to download comprehensive files that you can open in a spreadsheet. Use them to build a content inventory for an audit: what exists, who owns it, when it was last updated and how it is categorised and tagged.
The Content Report screen has three reports:
- the Content report lists pages, tasks, news and other content, one row for each item
- the Document report lists every document in the Media Library
- the Taxonomy report lists every term in a taxonomy, such as your tags or categories, with how often each is used
Only administrators can use the reports.
Download the content report
- Go to Tools, then Content Report.
- Under Content types, tick the kinds of content you want.
- Under Status, tick Published, Draft, Pending, Scheduled or Private.
- Optional: choose a Start date and an End date, and whether they mean Date published or Date modified.
- Select Download content report.
Your browser downloads a file called content-report, followed by the date and time.
Options for the content report
Content types
Tick one or more. The list shows Pages and Posts, and then every kind of content that is switched on for your intranet, such as Tasks, News, News updates, Blog posts, Events, Projects, Team news, Teams and Training. If you tick nothing, you get Pages only.
Status
Tick one or more of Published, Draft, Pending, Scheduled and Private. If you tick nothing, you get all five. Content in the bin is never included.
Start date and End date
Leave both blank for content of any date, including scheduled content that is dated in the future. Enter one date on its own for everything from, or up to, that date. Both dates are included in the period. If you enter the dates the wrong way round, the report swaps them.
Date published or Date modified
Choose what the dates apply to. Date published finds content first published in the period. Date modified finds content last changed in the period. To find content that has not been touched for two years, choose Date modified and enter an End date two years ago.
Download in parts
A large intranet can have more content than the report can produce in one go. If the download fails or is incomplete, enter a number in Posts per download, such as 1000, and 1 in Part. Download again with Part set to 2, then 3, until a part comes back with no rows. Join the parts in your spreadsheet. Otherwise leave both boxes empty.
What the content report contains
There is one row for each item, in the order the content was created.
- ID: the item’s number in WordPress. The Parent column refers to these numbers.
- Title: the title of the item.
- URL: the address of the item. Items that are not published yet have a temporary address ending in a number.
- Author: the email address of the author.
- Published: the date and time the item was published. For a draft, this is when it was last saved.
- Last modified: the date and time the item was last changed.
- Status: publish, draft, pending, future or private. Future means scheduled.
- Category/type: the news type for news, the news update type for news updates, the blog category for blog posts, the event type for events, the course type for training courses, the news group for team news, the award category for recognition wall entries, and the category for tasks, posts and other content.
- Tags: the item’s tags.
- A to Z: the letters the item is listed under in the A to Z index.
- Keywords: the contents of the item’s Keywords box.
- Relevanssi pin: every search term the item is pinned to, if you use Relevanssi Premium.
- Hide in search: shows “on” if the item is hidden from search results.
- Order: the item’s Order number, used to sort pages and the parts of guides.
- Parent: the ID of the parent item, or 0 if there is none.
- Post type: the internal name of the kind of content, such as page, task, news or blog.
- Attachments: the addresses of the item’s documents. These are the files in its Document attachments box, and any files that were uploaded while editing the item. The addresses match the URL column of the document report, so you can look a document up there.
- Teams: the addresses of the teams the item is associated with.
Categories, tags and A to Z letters are shown as slugs, which are the short names used in web addresses, such as “human-resources” for “Human Resources”. Several values in one cell are separated by commas.
An empty value shows as #N/A in your spreadsheet. This is deliberate. It lets you filter a column to #N/A to find everything that has no tags, no keywords or no category.
The Author column contains email addresses, so treat the file as personal data. Keep it somewhere suitable and delete it when the audit is finished.
Things to know about the content report
- Titles are shown as they were typed, including anything in square brackets, which staff do not see on the intranet.
- If a title or other text starts with an equals sign, a plus sign, a minus sign or an at sign, the report puts an apostrophe in front of it. This stops a spreadsheet treating it as a formula.
- The Attachments column cannot list a document that has since been deleted from the Media Library, even if the item’s Document attachments box still has a row for it.
Download the document report
Under Document report, select Download documents report. There are no options. The report lists every document in the Media Library, such as PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, in alphabetical order of title. It does not list images, audio or video.
- Title: the title of the document in the Media Library.
- URL: the address of the file itself.
- Author: the email address of the person who uploaded the document.
- Last modified: the date the document’s details were last changed in the Media Library.
- Category, Document type and A to Z: the document’s categories, its type and the letters it is listed under. These three columns only appear if your intranet uses the (Govintra) Media A to Z plugin, which adds them to documents.
- ID: the document’s number in WordPress.
- Parent: the ID of the page or other item the document was uploaded to. 0 means the document was uploaded straight into the Media Library.
To find out which item a Parent number refers to, look it up in the ID column of the content report.
Download the taxonomy report
A taxonomy is a set of terms used to organise content, such as tags, categories, news types, A to Z letters, grades and locations.
- Under Taxonomy report, choose one taxonomy. Each is shown with its internal name beside it.
- Select Download taxonomy report.
The file name includes the internal name of the taxonomy you chose, so you can download several and tell them apart. The report lists every term in alphabetical order, including terms that are not used.
- ID: the term’s number in WordPress.
- Name: the term as staff see it.
- Slug: the short name used in web addresses, which is what the content report shows.
- Parent ID: the ID of the parent term, or 0 if there is none.
- In use: how many published items use the term. For locations and grades, and for tags if your staff directory uses them, staff profiles that use the term are counted as well.
Open the reports in a spreadsheet
The columns in each file are separated by tabs. Numbers on a Mac and Google Sheets usually open the file in columns straight away.
If Excel shows everything in one column, select that column, choose Data, then Text to Columns, choose Delimited, tick Tab and select Finish. You can also open a blank workbook and use Data, then From Text/CSV, and choose Tab as the delimiter.
Ideas for a content audit
- Find old content. Sort the content report by Last modified, oldest first. Anything untouched for two years is worth reviewing, updating or removing.
- Find content with no owner. Filter the Author column for people who have left, and give their content to someone else.
- Find content that is hard to find. Filter Tags, Keywords or Category/type to #N/A.
- Find content hidden from search. Filter Hide in search to “on” and check that each item should still be hidden.
- Tidy your tags. In the taxonomy report for tags, sort by In use. Delete tags that are never used, and merge tags that mean the same thing.
- Find stray documents. In the document report, a Parent of 0 means the document was not uploaded to any page. Sort by Last modified to find old documents, and replace or remove them.
- Share the work. Add columns for Keep, Update or Remove, an owner and a deadline, and share the spreadsheet with your content owners.