Accepted, Not Yet Planned

Good idea, not planned yet but we will consider it for a future release.

Add an option to search for orphaned objects

Proposed changes for Web Client > Search Tab:

It would be extremely helpful if an option was added to the Search tab of the webclient that allowed writers to identify orphaned objects in the CCMS. The feature could be just a checkbox that would cause the search results of an object query to be limited to only those that are not referenced by any other object.

The rationale for this change is to enable a mechanism for garbage cleanup. Over the years, writers import and create a lot of unused content for their respective projects. This “garbage” is unreleased and unused and, although not difficult to identify (usually in draft status years after the creation), we are always hesitant to delete it for fear that it is referenced by another object and therefore has some value. By including an option to identify that these objects are unreleased AND orphaned, we can be fairly confident that we won’t cause any trouble by deleting them.