How to edit multiple posts in WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.7 Beta 2 is available for download now and I’ve been testing out some of the new features. In this post I’ll demonstrate some of the new bulk post editing functionality in WordPress 2.7.

In my WordPress 2.7 test blog I have published a handful of posts which I can see by clicking on the Edit link under Posts in the sidebar. All of the posts are in the Uncategorized category and have no tags applied to them.

I can select several blog posts and then choose Edit from the actions dropdown list at the top.

Now I can add the posts to a new category that I’ve created as well as add some tags to all of them at once. I can also edit other post options such as whether they are sticky posts, and whether pingbacks and comments are enabled.

This feature will be very useful for a number of different scenarios that bloggers commonly encounter, such as:

wanting to create a new category and add several previous posts to it (see “How to choose categories for your blog” at Problogger.net for more on this topic)
wanting to add more tags to previous posts
removing the sticky option from announcements that are no longer valid
publishing several completed drafts all at once (note: you can still stagger their actual publish dates in the visual editor)
disabling comments on older or archived posts