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TYPOlight Tip: Saving time with the Edit Multiple feature

– From practice

* Edit multiple

TYPOlight's Edit Multiple feature allows website managers the ability to select a set of records, choose which fields to manage, and edit the resulting data set on a single page. On paper, this does not sound like the most exciting feature, but in application it can be one of the biggest time savers for applying tedious changes to numerous records.

If you've worked with TYPOlight very much, chances are good that you have run into a situation requiring many similar changes to be made. For instance, you may have needed to update all page descriptions that are used in the meta tags. If your website has 20 pages, this would require you to edit each page individually. The Edit Multiple feature makes tasks like this much easier and quicker to manage. Also, it is very flexible and can be used in almost all areas of the TYPOlight backend. To best illustrate how to use this feature, I will provide a walk-through of updating the page descriptions on all pages of a website.

Setting things up

  1. From the TYPOlight backend, navigate to Layout > Site structure
  2. Click "Toggle all nodesToggle all nodes" from the upper-right either once or twice so that all pages are shown in the site structure tree
  3. Click "Edit multiple Edit multiple" from the upper-right to begin the process
  4. Click the "Select all" checkbox from the upper-right of the site structure tree (pictured below, left)
  5. Skip the "Delete selected" button (unless you want to kill your entire website) and click the "Edit selected" button
  6. From the list of available fields, select "Page name" and "Page description" and click the "Continue" button below the list (pictured below, center)
  7. You should now see a single page that lists only the page name and description for each page of the website (pictured below, right)

Select the data set that should be managed.Select the fields that that are available for edit.Manage only the selected fields for the selected data set.

Applying the changes

The reason we selected page name in addition to the description is because we need some form of identifier for each record. Otherwise, we would have a page full of description text areas without any way of knowing which page we are describing. You can now step through each text area filling in a meaningful description that will be used as the description meta tag, and subsequently the text that is used for SERP entries.

Further thoughts

The Edit Multiple feature is available throughout most areas of TYPOlight, including: Articles, News, Modules, Style sheets, Page layouts, Site structure and File manager. It is also available on many extensions and is especially useful for intensive data management extensions, such as the Catalog. The benefits of this feature can truly be appreciated in situations when you need to change a checkbox's state for 100 entries (think: "spacebar, tab, spacebar, tab, spacebar, tab ..."). Although it is an often-overlooked feature and it can not be used in every scenario, Edit Multiple is an amazing timesaver in appropriate situations.

The next time you need to apply many changes to multiple pages or articles in a website, think about whether you can use the Edit Multiple feature to speed things up before you individually edit each entry! Also, don't be shy about sharing your thoughts on this feature or letting us know if you found this post helpful.

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Comments

Comment by Ben |

Great tip and a great time saver. Can we have more blog post like this please? I'm sure there are a lot of features like this that people haven't discovered. Good work.

Comment by Ben Robinson |

Ben - Thanks for your comments and I'm glad you found my post helpful. Don't hold us to this, but the TYPOlight Team is making an effort to post more frequently to the blog. Among other topics, we plan to make "tips & tricks" as well as "extension reviews" a somewhat regular thing.

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