Content Type for Administrators

Posted by mrf on November 28, 2011 at 10:44pm

When working on large sites with many similar content types, I often find myself on an individual piece of content and don't have any idea what content type was used for it.

Would be a nice convenience to provide a field that is only visible to administrators on the node display and node edit screens to let them know what content type is currently in use.

Comments

Good idea, I have this a lot,

Posted by Niklas Fiekas on November 29, 2011 at 12:15am

Good idea, I have this a lot, too. Chances are I am going to do this or join someone who does this.

Drupal 7

Posted by matthewv789 on November 29, 2011 at 12:26am

In both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, it displays the content type on the "Find Content" listing, as well as allowing filtering by content type; in Drupal 7, it also displays it in a huge font at the top of the edit form. But when editing in Drupal 6, if you didn't come from the content listing page, I don't know how you'd be able to tell the content type.

Edit Content Type Tab module

Posted by sreynen on November 29, 2011 at 12:33am

This D6 module looks like it does what you want, showing the content type within a convenient link to edit the content type:

http://drupal.org/sandbox/earlofsandwich/1331698

I think earlofsandwich has

Posted by mrf on November 29, 2011 at 12:43am

I think earlofsandwich has the answer. The main reason I need this is when I'm adding a field or changing a display formatter, so jumping straight to the content type edit screen would be really nice. Displaying it on the node view isn't completely necessary if its just a click away.

body class + bookmarklet

Posted by donquixote on November 29, 2011 at 12:55am

Depending on your theme, you probably have the node type in your body class. If not, you can encode it somewhere else.
Then a little bookmarklet to read this information.

Not everything needs to be a module :)

Node type in a body class is

Posted by mrf on November 29, 2011 at 1:11am

Node type in a body class is likely, but not guaranteed. Adding all this to the theme is definitely possible, but nowhere near as easy as "drush dl content_type_tab" and not worth the effort on an inherited site where you just want to add a single field to an unknown content type.

Glad to see that this is in core for D7 which is where this type of basic usability enhancement really belongs, we should be doing everything we can by default to not leave it up to every site owner to know that these problems exist and fix them themselves in the them layer.

Definitely not in the theme

Posted by donquixote on November 29, 2011 at 1:22am

Definitely not in the theme layer. There are other ways to inject information into html head or elsewhere.
(and yes, the module you mentioned might be doing just that - I did not really check)

I remember having had something similar as a block once, but I was not really happy about it. I don't want to bloat the visual experience (even if it is for admin only).

I wonder, what about having this somewhere in the admin menu?
More general, this could be a dropdown showing various information and related links about the page you are currently on.