Administrators and users of plone sites usually need to apply the same change to hundreds of items dispersed in the site. Current options for doing such a task are very poor, mainly because they imply doing the change once per item.

It is very common for users and site administrators to encounter a need to edit metadata fields on many content items at once. For example:

    * The content taxonomy for a site may change, and it may become necessary to re-taxonomize a large number of items.
    * It may be necessary to adjust created and/or effective dates for a group of items.
    * The writing style guidelines for a site may change, making it necessary to retitle a large number of articles.
    * There may turnover in the userbase for a site, making it necessary to change the owner of a large number of items.
    * A site administrator may want to enable or disable comments on a batch of items.
    * A site administrator may want to write missing descriptions for a batch of items.

Plone currently forces content editors to do this one item at a time, which involves a huge number of mouse clicks and slow page refreshes.

Plone Batch Editing is a response for those users that usually needs to perform hundreds of administrative tasks to the content items spread in their sites; providing:

 * A search form for selecting the items to edit, and also in search results, a set of posibilities:

  * Apply the same change to every item (e.g. set the same description text to all selected items)

  * Apply the same transformation to every item (e.g. fill each item description with item title, or lowercase all item titles.)

  * Apply to each item a customized change on a particular field (e.g. a big list of selected items. Clicking on each an input field is displayed with the current data, and item is edited, all without needing to refresh)

(This proposal is based on one that Jon Stahl posted here: http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/164)