See at a glance what’s missing in WordPress admin lists

Searching through your WordPress media library for items without “alt” text, caption or description can be time consuming and is error prone, especially if you’ve more than a few images to check. A quick scan could easily reveal what information is missing; if only these three columns were available. Well, as you’ll see, it’s easy to add them with two minor additions to your WordPress theme’s functions.php file.

Define your custom columns

First we need to tell WordPress the internal and external names of the custom columns we want to add to the media library.

add_filter('manage_media_columns','isv_custom_media_column_headings');

function isv_custom_media_column_headings($defaults) {
   $defaults['isv_alt']     = 'Alt';
   $defaults['isv_caption'] = 'Caption';
   $defaults['isv_desc']    = 'Description';
   return $defaults;
}

You can enable and disable your custom columns using the screen options panel at the top of the page in exactly the same way as for the standard columns.

Fill your custom columns with data

For each media item WordPress asks us what value to show in each of our custom columns. The ALT text comes from a post metadata field, whereas the caption is stored in the post excerpt and the description in the post content.

add_action('manage_media_custom_column','isv_custom_media_column_content',10,2);

function isv_custom_media_column_content($column_name,$id) {
   $none = '<span style="background-color:yellow; color:black;">None</span>';
   switch ($column_name) {
      case 'isv_alt':
         $alt = get_post_meta($id,'_wp_attachment_image_alt',true);
         echo $alt ? $alt : $none;
         break;
      case 'isv_caption':
         $caption = get_the_excerpt();
         echo $caption ? $caption : $none;
         break;
      case 'isv_desc':
         $desc = get_the_content();
         echo $desc ? $desc : $none;
         break;
   }
}

I highlight “none” with an inline CSS style so missing information really stands out.

And that’s all there is to it. Simple!

Add custom columns to other WordPress Admin lists

Use the exact same approach to add custom columns to other WordPress Admin lists. Here are the filter and action names you’ll need:

Posts

Filter: manage_posts_columns, Action: manage_posts_custom_column

Pages

Filter: manage_pages_columns, Action: manage_pages_custom_column

Comments

Filter: manage_edit-comments_columns, Action: manage_comments_custom_column

I’ve added custom columns to my post and page lists for the excerpt and featured image thumbnail. On my comments list I’ve added a custom column to highlight pingbacks and trackbacks so they stand out amongst the other comments.

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Hi, I’m Andrew Biss. Here on my personal blog I post on business and technical innovation. In the software industry since 1980, I’ve held senior development, marketing and strategy positions at independent software vendors (ISVs) in the UK, US, France and Germany. Please click here to learn more about Andrew-Biss.com.

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