xbArtMan is a component to provide some additional tools for backend administration of Joomla content. Initially it focuses on three areas that I have had difficulty with - seeing what tags are assigned to which articles, seeing what links are embedded in articles and defined as related item links (and checking that they are valid), and seeing what images are used in which articles.

Documentation 

This is a project that is continuing in development but I am already finding it quite useful so I am making it available here as-is for comment. I am open to suggestions for ways in which it might evolve - I have some ideas of my own shown in the roadmap below.

Currently it offers four new views in the backend:

1. Articles:tags
2. Articles:links
3. Articles:images
4. Article Edit simplified

The tags view provides a table view of articles featuring the tags assigned to each article. The normal status, title, alias, category, date and id information is provided but the focus of the view is to shown the tags, grouped according to their top top level tag (this assumes you are using the tag hierarchy to categorise your tags - if you aren't no problem). Sorting and filtering by tag is supported as is batch addition of tags.

The Links view provides the basic article info with two featured columns showing the "Related Links (A,B,C)" defined in the article options editing and also a listing of all links found within the body text of the article - these are found by searching for <a ...>...</a> tags in the text.
The links found in the body are categorised as internal/external/in-page/targets/other. The internal and external links can be tested to see if they are returning a valid page, and internal links can be previewed in a modal window. (the modal popup uses mootools so is ok in Joomla v3.9 but will fail in Joomla v4 and there is as yet no direct replacement)

The images view does a similar job for <img .../> tags found in the article text. Currently it just lists them - improvements being worked on are shown in the roadmap below.

The Article simple edit view provides a quick way of editing the tags and related links for an article (also the title, alias, status and category) without all the clutter of multiple tabs and ability to edit everything.

Obviously there is much more that could be done with this, but the key idea is to keep things simple and focus on single functions - checking that articles are tagged correctly, checking that embedded links and images are not broken, managing the related links and featured images for articles.

In particular for images I dream of a way of seeing which images are being used - in much the same way as the backend tags view provides the ability to list all articles using a particular tag already (although it is a bit hidden, and not very well presented - see a coming item on core admin template overrides)

Roadmap

Improvements and bug fixes

1. Improve the Images view. 
   1. automatically check internal files exist
   2. optional check for valid off-site images
   3. improve layout of list
   4. add support for article featured images defined in the article options
2. Add support for other types of images that are not simple <img /> tags
   1. sigplus galleries
   2. modal image popups
3. Provide batch remove for tags in the Articles:tags view
4. Add a new view for article fields

Possible New features

1. open to suggestions

Changelog