How to Search for an Article by ID in Joomla

If you have been working on Joomla websites for a long time now, you might have run into the situation where you needed to search for an article by ID instead of its title. This is an extremely easy task if you have access to phpMyAdmin (you just need to login to phpMyAdmin, and go the #__content table for the database that is serving your Joomla website, and then click on Search on the top, and then filter on the id field), but what if you don’t? Is there a way to do this through Joomla’s backend?

Fortunately, there is: Joomla 2.5 has an undocumented feature that allows administrators to search for an article by ID, here’s how to do this:

• Login to Joomla’s backend.

• Go to Content > Article Manager

• Next to the Filter field, type the following: id:[article_id], for example id:1501, where 1501 is the ID of the article that you’re searching for.

• Surprise! Now the article with the ID that is equal to [article_id] is listed. Easy huh?

To save you some research time, here’s a quick faq about this feature:

Why is this feature undocumented?

We don’t know – but it might be that the Joomla developers believe it is too technical, and that Joomla administrators do not need to care about the IDs of their articles (which is wrong, in our opinion).

Can one search for multiple articles in one shot by searching for id:[article_1_id],[article_2_id],[article_3_id]?

Unfortunately no.

Are there other Easter Eggs like this one?

Not that we know of.

Does this feature work on the frontend?

No it doesn’t. This feature is exclusive to the backend.

Does one need to be a super administrator for this method to work?

No – it works for anyone who has access to the backend.

How did you know about this feature?

We knew about the existence of this feature while reading the code of a Joomla core file some time ago.

If you have the ID of an article and if you want to search for it, then the above method is guaranteed to work, provided you have access to Joomla’s backend. But, if you need to run some extremely advanced search on your Joomla articles, then probably your best option is to contact us, we can run any query that you want (no matter how complicated it is), we can also extend Joomla’s article manager functionality to include that query as a “special” filter. Our fees are affordable, our work is professional, and we are the friendliest programmers on planet Earth!