Classify Content in Bulk: Feature a CMS Serious About Content Marketing Should Offer

| | 2 min read

If you are into content-based lead generation, classifying your content into different buckets and generating call-to-actions and analytics around it is one activity that you do very often.

In many of our projects, we use multiple axes to classify content and use that as input to our analytics, advertisements and marketing automation systems to optimize the funnels. In vanilla Drupal, classifying content manually is a pain.

There are a few contributed modules available to help. Here is how we do it currently on our projects.

The first step is to filter the content based on available taxonomy. Views, Core Views Facets and Bulk Edit Terms are the key enablers for this feature.

Content Filtering

All the taxonomy terms are available as facets and they can be used to drill down to the set of content you want to update.

Article with No Pillar Topics

Here I’m trying to find content with no pillar topic added. I’ve also added the filter to show only articles that have no pillar topic taxonomy.

Selected Content
Update terms

Once the filters are applied, you can select the content you want to update and apply the update terms action. It will show the list of taxonomies available and you can pick the one you want to change.

Select topic

I have updated 3 nodes here with a pillar term

Updated
Filter Content

The report interface will be back with the rest of the content and you can continue till you classify all the content.

Setting up something like this in Drupal is pretty straightforward and easy to do. Really happy to see the growth from a CMS to a platform for ambitious site builders.

The task is not done here, there are a lot of optimizations required to the UI we made. I am exploring the possibility to create something that allows us to pick a vocabulary from a list and update the term there itself. Something that is there in Redmine is ideal for some situations.

Redmine

 Anyhow the current system is quite capable and handling the current needs of the content marketing teams of organisations we currently work with, will keep posting updates on the progress we make in this.